writer's block

[Sweejak]

Claim you are on the Writer's Strike.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Seek moral relevancy.

The brain is a survival tool. That's what it is designed to do by figuring out patterns to enable the survival of the animal and the larger group as social animal.

What is it people don't know that can hurt them?

That's what I write about.

[MacCruiskeen]

Q: Do you ever get writer's block?

A: I disavow that term. There are times when you don't
know what you're doing or when you don't have access to
the language or the event. So if you're sensitive, you
can't do it. When I wrote "Beloved," I thought about it
for three years. I started writing the manuscript after
thinking about it, and getting to know the people and
getting over the fear of entering that arena, and it
took me three more years to write it. But those other
three years I was still at work, though I hadn't put a
word down.

http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitpri ... ison1.html

[Et in Arcadia ego]

For writer's(and other mental blocks), Archimedes leads the way to the solution.

[Foote Hertz]

"Wendy, Let Me Explain Something To You"

[Et in Arcadia ego]

[anothershamus]

I guess I should check out more of this site. I didn't know that there was that problem. Has posting helped?

[MacCruiskeen]

[...] These are the three questions most often posed to writers, both by readers
and by themselves:

Who are you writing for?

Why do you do it?

Where does it come from?

While I was writing these pages, I began compiling a list of answers to one
of these questions – the question about motive. Some of these answers may
appear to you to be more serious than others, but they are all real, and
there is nothing to prevent a writer from being propelled by several of them
at once, or indeed by all. They are taken from the words of writers
themselves – retrieved from such dubious sources as newspaper interviews
and autobiographies, but also recorded live from conversations in the backs
of bookstores before the dreaded group signing, or between bites in cut-rate
hamburger joints and tapas bars and other such writerly haunts, or in the
obscure corners of receptions given to honor other, more prominent writers;
but also from the words of fictional writers – all written of course by writers
– though these are sometimes disguised in works of fiction as painters or
composers or other artistic folk. Here then is the list:

To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten.
To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for
revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because
to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are
alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often
found after the early twentieth century, or not in that form). To please
myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a
perfect work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or – the
Marquis de Sade defense, used by ironists – vice versa. To hold a mirror up
to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society
and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the
hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and
honor. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could
have shoes. To make money so I could sneer at those who formerly sneered
at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create
is Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new word. To
make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national
conscience. To justify my failures in school. To justify my own view of
myself and my life, because I couldn’t be ‘a writer’ unless I actually did
some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was.
To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any woman
at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections
of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale.
To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the
time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania. Compulsive
logorrhea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control.
Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell
into the embrace of the Muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and
needed to give birth to a book (an interesting piece of cross-dressing,
indulged in by male writers of the seventeenth century). Because I had
books instead of children (several twentieth-century women). To serve Art.
To serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To justify the ways of
God toward man. To act out antisocial behavior for which I would have been
punished in real life. To master a craft so I could generate texts (a recent
entry). To subvert the Establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is
right. To experiment with new forms of perception. To create a recreational
boudoir so the reader could go into it and have fun (translated from a Czech
newspaper). Because the story took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go (the
Ancient Mariner defense). To search for understanding of the reader and
myself. To cope with my depression. For my children. To make a name that
would survive death. To defend a minority group or oppressed class. To
speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose appalling
wrongs or atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To
bear witness to horrifying events that I have survived. To speak for the
dead. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To praise the universe. To
allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of
what has been given to me.

Evidently, any search for a clutch of common motives would prove fruitless:
the sine qua non, the essential nugget without which writing would not be
itself, was not to be found there. Mavis Gallant begins the Preface to her
Selected Stories with a shorter and more sophisticated list of writers’
motives, beginning with Samuel Beckett, who said writing was all he was
good for, and ending with the Polish poet Aleksander Wat, who told her that
it was like the story of the camel and the Bedouin: in the end, the camel
takes over. ‘So that was the writing life:’ she comments, ‘an insistent
camel.’

Having failed on the subject of motives, I took a different approach: instead
of asking other writers why they did it, I asked them what it felt like.
Specifically, I asked novelists, and I asked them what it felt like when they
went into a novel. None of them wanted to know what I meant by into. One
said it was like walking into a labyrinth, without knowing what monster
might be inside; another said it was like groping through a tunnel; another
said it was like being in a cave – she could see daylight through the opening,
but she herself was in darkness. Another said it was like being under water,
in a lake or ocean. Another said it was like being in a completely dark room,
feeling her way: she had to rearrange the furniture in the dark, and then
when it was all arranged the light would come on. Another said it was like
wading through a deep river, at dawn or twilight; another said it was like
being in an empty room which was nevertheless filled with unspoken words,
with a sort of whispering; another said it was like grappling with an unseen
being or entity; another said it was like sitting in an empty theatre before
any play or film had started, waiting for the characters to appear.

Dante begins the Divine Comedy – which is both a poem and a record of the
composition of that poem – with an account of finding himself in a dark,
tangled wood, at night, having lost his way, after which the sun begins to
rise. Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark
room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.

Margaret Laurence and others have said that it is like Jacob wrestling with
his angel in the night – an act in which wounding, naming, and blessing all
take place at once.

Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often
combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one’s way
forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of
going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these
were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing. I
was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior
of the human body, forty years ago: ‘It’s dark in there.’

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a
compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring
something back out to the light. [...]

--Extract from Negotiating With the Dead by Margaret Atwood

[§ê¢rꆧ]

Great stuff Mac. Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite writers of fiction.

[MinM]

Kurt Vonnegut on Sports

Shortly after his 2007 death, it was discovered that Kurt Vonnegut had once written for Sports Illustrated. The story goes that he was told to write about a horse that jumped the rail and ran amok in the infield, but after sitting at his desk for hours he left the building silently. The only thing written on his now abandoned typewriter was this:

The horse jumped over the fucking fence...

http://therookies.wordpress.com/2009/03 ... episode-2/

[ShinShinKid]

Rent a couple of really good movies that you enjoy, and watch them comfortably.
I think just switching the focus of our internal narrative sometimes helps.

[MinM]

@MitchAlbom:

Panicking about all u hav 2 do by tmrw? interesting take on procrastination + creativity via @adammgrant in @nytimes http://ow.ly/XbMwh

Seek moral relevancy.

The brain is a survival tool. That's what it is designed to do by figuring out patterns to enable the survival of the animal and the larger group as social animal.

What is it people don't know that can hurt them?

That's what I write about.