If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
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Highlights
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Perhaps youâve complained before that you donât have anything to write about. That your âmind has gone blank,â that you donât have any ideas. I donât believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. Youâre always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles.
- The remedy is simple, although it does involve a short, sharp shock of frankness with oneself. Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you. If, deep down, you want to write about misunderstood teen gymnasts with pet magic lions, your literary fiction about sad suburbanites will not easily come out of you, and it will probably not come off well.
- Or, to put it another way, it should feel like work rather than labor. This criterion was proposed by art critic Dave Hickey, who, after writing about and working among many of the great visual artists of our time, said in an interview, of creative work, âI think that if you donât like it and itâs not easy, you shouldnât be doing it ⌠I mean itâs work, but itâs not labor.â Intuitively, we understand this distinction well. Labor is breaking rocks with a pick-ax while someone holds a gun to your head. Labor is your tenth hour in the warehouse when your vertebrae are starting to feel crunchy. Work can be challenging, surprising, effortful, emotional, but it isnât something that requires intense coercion, although may require a little coercion, sometimes, in the form of a deadline or a structured work environment of some kind. Most tellingly, it feels rewarding, in a deeper way than the âthank fuck thatâs overâ swell of relief you feel at the end of a day of laboring. It feels like you did something on earth.
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Inevitably, if youâre honest, you find out that youâre not exactly who you aspire to be. There is some distance between you and your exemplars. Maybe itâs a short distance, or maybe youâre way off to the side. Maybe you thought you were a clear-eyed rational pragmatist, and you discover that youâre a rover with the soul of a poet. Or perhaps the opposite. That can be painful. But itâs ultimately easier to take this pain than persist in a false, lonely place, conducting a masquerade that, even if it fools others, canât fool you. If you canât even be frank about who you are in a room alone, I find it hard to believe that you can do it with the people in your life.