© copyright 2001
Mark J. McGarry

He reads about other writers, ferociously productive: Frederik Pohl, who writes four pages every day. Stephen King, who writes about the same amount, but with Christmas and his birthday off. Gene Wolfe reportedly does five a day. Dean Koontz, in Writing Popular Fiction, reports that he writes ten pages every day, final draft, and makes up for the days he takes off. The writer is surrounded by the books of Pohl and King and Koontz and Wolfe. They don't get blocked. The evidence is all around him, on his bookshelves.

But there he also finds the last known whereabouts of those who are missing in action. Whatever happened to P.J. Plauger, who won a Campbell Award and then headed for parts unknown? Perhaps he simply said all he had to say.

But where is the new John Varley novel? Or, for that matter, the new Harper Lee? And what about Ellison? Not Harlan — though a list of that worthy's announced-but-as-yet-undelivered projects would make a formidable bibliography all by themselves — but Ralph, who died a few years ago, having labored for better than four decades on a follow-up to Invisible Man. Blocked or otherwise, plenty of writers stop writing — or at least stop publishing.

So perhaps those words of conventional wisdom may require some editing. It is not: "If you had to do this for a living, you couldn't afford to get blocked." Rather, it is: "If you get blocked, you can't afford to do this for a living."

The blocked writers were not left to die on a hillside, like cripples in a less forgiving time. A rope around the neck or a bullet through the tormented brain is too dramatic for real life. Instead, they now write very short sentences at an ad agency, edit other people's words at a newspaper or magazine, or fill in for the carpenter who walked off the job one day and never came back.

The self-assured writers who speak of "carpenter's block" may not believe in writer's block simply because they've never experienced it. They've had bad days, dry spells (Koontz says his longest was "the worst two hours of my life"), but they apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair (another favorite phrase) and eventually the words come. The words always come, for them, and so they believe the words always come for any professional who expends the requisite effort.

Those writers, of course, may be doing carpentry themselves. They're competing for beer money, rapping out a story, just telling a tale. Outwardly, their stories are no different from the stories the failed writer published before the block fell on him, but they came from a different place to arrive on the page. Written more from the head than from the heart, perhaps.Certainly not written from the same fixation that fueled the failed writer. The carpenters do not have that unhealthy emotional investment, that obsession which the failed writer never asked for but which he made work for him. It worked for a time, that is, until that which he loved came back and hurt him so badly he could no longer write.

The failed writer eventually realizes that carpentry is not writing — not his kind of writing, at least — and he goes back to the smooth white page. This time he sees around him the books of writers who surged back into print after long dry spells, Theodore Sturgeon and Damon Knight foremost among them. Then there are lesser names, who are passing through "where's he been?" on their way to "glad he's back."

If he struggles long enough, the professional writer discovers a few universal truths:

• The first step to recovery is to realize that you can't give up. Perhaps it would be better if you could, if you could direct that writing energy into another activity that would make you happy (or at least not make you unhappy), but eventually you will be compelled to try to write again and you will be kicking your ass for letting months or years go by without even trying.

• Even if writing becomes possible again, it may never come easily. Look at the block as dipsomaniacs look at alcoholism: do not fall off the wagon for even a day. Write, or try to write, every day. If you do fall off the wagon, get right back on.

• Your writing may seem like garbage, but the quality of your prose probably cannot, and has not, fallen below a minimum, professional standard. Don't throw anything away. If you can't stand to look at it now, file it away.

• While a productive writer can often continue producing through periods of great disruption — moving cross-country, buying a house, bankruptcy, divorce, the death of a close friend — a blocked writer, under such conditions, almost certainly cannot make much headway against his predicament. Clear away the external problems so you can focus on the internal.

• After a short period of lament and self-pity, stop talking about the block and focus entirely on the work. Inquiries can be answered with, "I'm still having some problems, but I'm in there punching."

Then get in there and punch.