My first contribution to Speculations, Kent Brewster's magazine for aspiring SF and fantasy writers, was on a topic I'm only too familiar with. Even when I can't write anything else, I can always write about writers block.
— mjm
©
copyright
2001
Mark
J. McGarry
The would-be writer picks up this month's Analog or Fantasy & Science-Fiction and imagines his name on the cover, a Barclay Shaw painting inspired by his characters. "If only I could write that well..." the wannabe thinks, and goes home to try again.
The continuation of the thought sustains in the face of ten thousand blank pages, an expanse of white seemingly more vast than the Arctic. Once covered with words, the pages are dispatched in manila envelopes and inevitably return by the same conveyance. "If only I will get a small envelope today," he thinks. "If only I could write that well...."
The continuation of the thought holds all the writer's dreams. If only he could write that well, he would sell stories, see his name in print, cash a few checks to help pay for the computer and printer charged to his overburdened Visa card.
Maybe then he sells a novel, more money comes in, then reviews in Locus and PW, a Nebula nomination, a collection of short stories — perhaps one of them the story he mailed yesterday to Ellen Datlow. In time — but not much time — a big novel, guest-of-honor gigs, a Hugo and Nebula (same year), a little house on Martha's Vineyard, a Mercedes, a wife who looks like Kathy Ireland and edits like David Hartwell. But over every page he writes looms the possibility — no, the near certainty — of failure. The story will not sell. But if only it would.
At this point, before he sells even one story, the wannabe cannot imagine the day when, having sold a handful of stories, perhaps a book or two, the pages will remain smooth and white. Or, more likely, they will be covered with sentences laid down with agonizing slowness, every word like a drop of blood, and then shoved in alongside yesterday's coffee grounds and orange rinds. Garbage.
John Gardner, in On Becoming a Novelist, may have described it best: "...not so much a failure of faith as a failure of will. The writer suffering writer's block can think of good plots and characters, or anyway he can think of good starts, which is all a healthy writer needs, but he can't persuade himself that they're worth writing down or developing. It's all been done before, he tells himself. And if he does, by a supreme effort, get down a few sentences, he finds the sentences disgustingly bad."
"If only I could finish a story," the writer now thinks. In the past five years, every story he has managed to finish he has sold. But he has finished only three. "If only," he thinks, and tries again. More blood on the page.
He tries everything. A new office, a new computer. Then it's no computer; he goes back to typewriter, pen and paper, perhaps dictation. He tries short stories rather than novels. Instead of science fiction, fantasy; then a mystery. A pen-name may liberate him. (It doesn't.) He takes a long vacation. Then he resolves not to take a single day off from writing, not to move, until this damned story is finished and in the mail. (Eventually, he moves: he goes to the bar and gets drunk. In that way, at least, he can still get in the ring with Hemingway.)
But mostly he talks. He talks to friends, fellow writers, his wife or girlfriend, a pricey psychologist. (The Visa card is groaning again, but if only he can finish that novel, he can use the delivery money to pay it off.)
Sooner, rather than later, he hears: "Carpenters don't get carpenter's block." The implication, of course, is that writers should not get writer's block. It is probably the psychologist who says this, but if it is a fellow writer — a successful, selling writer — the words that follow are likely to be: "If you had to do this for a living, you know, you couldn't afford to get blocked."
These are good words to keep in mind when at first the words don't come. They are tough, but not cruel. "You can do it if you want it bad enough. You can do it if you try hard enough."
But if the writer is blocked long, or blocked often, the well-intentioned words are at best irrelevant and at worst are another well-placed kick to a bruised ego. "Carpenters don't get carpenter's block," the unproductive writer realizes. After all, he has never seen a carpenter staring blankly at hammer and nails, wondering what to do next. (Of course, the carpenter— who were he "blocked" would call it "burnout" — has never seen a writer reading with growing horror a perfectly good chapter that will end up in the wastebasket within the hour.)
Still, the evidence that the writer is somehow wrong is overwhelming. Once, he wrote stories and sold them. Now, he cannot. Stories from Connie Willis and Ray Aldridge still appear in the magazines, just as they did when the writer was starting out, and with about the same frequency, he thinks. They still produce, and their stories are as good as ever — which is to say, better than any of his.