I’ve just been wandering through my ByJane Archives seeing if there’s anything there that I can do a quick and dirty snatch and grab for this week’s Wednesday Writer’s Workshop. Just a cursory glance tells me that I whine a lot.
Okay, I knew that already. A lot of my writing about writing in the past has been from the depths of writer’s block. O woe is me, I have a deadline and nothing to say. O woe is me, I have great thoughts but they’re stuck in my head. O woe….
Over the years, I’ve learned that for me the only way out of writer’s block is to write. Anything. Blah De Blah Blah. Dumb. Stuff. Sort of makes sense, though, doesn’t it? If you can’t write, write about not being able to write.
But you know something? It works.
Writer’s block happens when your head and your mind are not in the same place. You set out to write a post describing the glorious extravaganza you made for Thanksgiving. When you sit down at the computer, though, all you do is rerun an endless tape of the argument that you got into with your brother-in-law. Or you’ve got a report due next week, but every time you go to write it, you start feeling incredibly, immeasurably sad. Or, the worst of all, you’re working on a writing project in which you’ve suddenly, for no apparent reason, lost faith. All of these situations drive you to curl up in bed or go out in the garden or anywhere else but in front of the work at hand.
In short–and oversimplifying–your creative pathways are littered with junk: with your anger at your brother-in-law, your boredom with your job, your fear that what you’re working on doesn’t match what you intended. What you need is to rotor-root the line, clear out the junk so that you can get back to giving your full attention to the task at hand, your writing.
The best way I’ve found of doing that is to write my state of mind. Maybe I’ll do it as a letter to my brother-in-law detailing in full-blown garbage mouth language all the ways in which I dislike him. Or a memo to my boss, explaining to her why the job bores me, why I’m better than the work she’s giving me, and set out my plans for leaving if things don’t change soon. Or a note to myself in which I–yes–whine about my insecurity as a writer and how giving in to multiple self-generated censors in my head just makes the situation worse. What I’ve done, then, is gotten the junk out of my head and onto a page, where I can put it to look at later.
John Steinbeck used to start each day when he was writing East of Eden with a letter to his publisher in which he wrote out the junk in his head. He published them later as Journal of A Novel: The East of Eden Letters. They’re a fascinating window into his writing process, one that has always made me feel a lot more comfortable about my own.
And you? How do you deal with writer’s block? How do you get rid of your junk?
