Edward Bulwer-Lytton will Argue the Affirmative

I think I've finally come to the scientific conclusion that "writer's block" is a myth. It sounds so romantic when you read about it in author's biographies because it takes the ability to write and dislocates it from the active, logical mind and posits it somewhere mystical and ethereal, as though the words will only come if we find the right combination of twilight, whimsy, syphilis and beer to coax the Homunculus of Literate Expression to get his shit together and spit mad game.

It's also something of a leveler, socially speaking, the idea that people of real ability have an intermittent relationship with the inscrutable subterranean spring of readable word-put-together-ing (which, OK, failed just there). The subtext is that writing well isn't something anyone can actually do; it's just something some people are better at conjuring under some kind of Masonic hoodoo self-hypnosis that, if YOU could figure out the secret to, my God, think of how your Edward/Jacob Twilight slashfic will soar! The flip-side implication being, of course, that when a gifted writer cannot write (is "blocked"), well, they're just like you and/or me, toiling away, writing thousands and thousands of words that will never be published. The difference, of course, is that a writer of ability can recognize that the reason those thousands of words written while "blocked" won't be published isn't because of a tragic social misunderstanding of obvious awesomeness, but because they suck.

At root, that's what writer's block is and why it isn't anything: a choking hyper-self-consciousness that both strangles the flow of words and warps the writer's ability to recognize things that are good. Amongst the writers of real ability that I know (and I know a precious [in all senses] few), the name for this state is "Monday." Unless you're trying to write on Tuesday. Then it's that. What I'm saying is that self-flagellation and a reflectiveness that makes masturbation look like altruism are common-thread aspects of the writerly personality.

The basic, default state of a writer, then, is "writer's block." It's not that a writer can't write--once you get the QWERTY keyboard layout more or less worked out, there's not really much else to it--it's simply that nothing anybody writes ever is any good to anyone. Walk into any Barnes & Noble and you'll see what I mean. Pick up the first book you see. Flip to any page. Read a paragraph. See? Total shit. Definitely should have been edited. THAT hack bastard should have had MORE writer's block. Unless you picked up a Garfield anthology, in which case, disregard the above.

The remarkable, notable periods aren't the stretches of "writer's block" but more the unexpected and unreliable frenzies of "writer's flow." It's a freak accident; a brief alchemical mixture of hope, desperation, clear-headedness, false confidence and (usually) the ENORMOUS support of one or more trusted others screaming at the author to get something done, dragging him/her forward against the immovable inertia of regular human laziness and the tentative steps of scrawny, trembling legs under an emaciated, mewling, love-starved ego.

I'll probably get kicked out of the Subnational Siblinghood of Failed Writers Local #98124 for telling you this, but the phrase "writer's block" is really just a code. You'll read about periods of intense inactivity by people like Kerouac or Hemingway or Joyce or whomever attributed to the feared and infernal "block," but really we're talking about binge drinking, habitual drug use, temporary gonorrheal blindness, an extended experimentation with homosexuality or death. And don't let that "or" at the end fool you either; the answer is typically more essay form than multiple choice. Not everyone knows that it took Poe 20 years to write Cask of Amontillado because he spent the interim working as a rent boy who was paid exclusively in sailor's grog and penicillin.

For the modern writer, when you line up their productive periods to find the common holes of "writer's block" in their bibliographies, I think you'll find they all coincide neatly with releases of each iteration of Grand Theft Auto.

Me, I tend to approach writer's block in a literal way. I approach things in my way and shove them aside. Usually I start with my couch. You can call it "feng shui" if you want to. I prefer to think of it as a preferable alternative to cirrhosis.