The mystery of writer's block
Whether you write for a living or--like I--write as an important expansion of your life, you have experienced writer's block. And there are as many "solutions" for writer's block as there are periods of staring blankly at a computer screen.
One school of thought is to use prompts, and I have some healthy respect for that school. Years ago, I was a member of a writers' forum which focused on short fiction (at the time, I was writing creative non-fiction and short fiction). Once a week, someone presented a randomly-found prompt, and participants had an hour in which to write a short story.
I was sometimes amazed by what I was able to do in an hour. I think that all of my stories were eventually published, too. The restriction of both time and topic had a similar effect to the restriction of form in poetry, which I discussed in an earlier post: It forced my brain to operate in a new way.
Another popular recommended solution for writer's block is the habit of writing every day. I write almost every day, though much of my writing isn't poetry or fiction--it's the writing I do about women's professional tennis, or it's personal writing of a journal-type nature. Nevertheless, it is writing. Does writing every day help? I don't know. My instinct says that it does, but I don't know for sure.
A third popular solution is free-writing. But among the free-writing methods, the one that stands out--and which has been widely misrepresented--is Julia Cameron's "morning papers." Cameron, in The Artist's Way, contends that the key to opening the floodgates for any kind of creative person is for that person to handwrite three stream-of-consciousness pages every morning precisely upon awakening. This is because--in the time of awakening--the brain is in a receptive state and is able to easily release unconscious material.
Unfortunately, countless people have written about morning pages without understanding why the pages must be written upon awakening. Writing morning pages is not like doing other free-write exercises (and the time of day isn't the only difference--Cameron has set several sensible rules for using morning pages). In order to understand the process, it's necessary to read Cameron's work, and not one of the many useless interpretations of it.
I have never done the morning pages because of a sleep disorder (or at least, that's my excuse, and so far, it has validity for me). Other people cannot do them because of the needs of children and/or pets and the absence of another adult who can perform the tasks to meet those needs). My gut feeling, though--considering what I know about the human brain--is that writing the morning pages is probably the best all-around solution to resolving any type of creative block. I still hope to undertake the project at some point.
Writer's block comes and goes. For me, there are two types of writer's block. One is the obvious type--I cannot write anything, I can't imagine how I ever wrote anything, I don't know when I will write anything again.
The other type is trickier: I can write, but I'm pushing into it, rather than having it come to me. I know what the poem is about, but I have to struggle with constructing it. When that block is absent, it's as though the poem just arrives, complete with assonance, consonance and appropriate images. In my experience, writing sonnets and blank verse gives me the best chance of having the poems just arrive for me. There's something, at least for me, about iambic pentameter that clears the way.
One school of thought is to use prompts, and I have some healthy respect for that school. Years ago, I was a member of a writers' forum which focused on short fiction (at the time, I was writing creative non-fiction and short fiction). Once a week, someone presented a randomly-found prompt, and participants had an hour in which to write a short story.
I was sometimes amazed by what I was able to do in an hour. I think that all of my stories were eventually published, too. The restriction of both time and topic had a similar effect to the restriction of form in poetry, which I discussed in an earlier post: It forced my brain to operate in a new way.
Another popular recommended solution for writer's block is the habit of writing every day. I write almost every day, though much of my writing isn't poetry or fiction--it's the writing I do about women's professional tennis, or it's personal writing of a journal-type nature. Nevertheless, it is writing. Does writing every day help? I don't know. My instinct says that it does, but I don't know for sure.
A third popular solution is free-writing. But among the free-writing methods, the one that stands out--and which has been widely misrepresented--is Julia Cameron's "morning papers." Cameron, in The Artist's Way, contends that the key to opening the floodgates for any kind of creative person is for that person to handwrite three stream-of-consciousness pages every morning precisely upon awakening. This is because--in the time of awakening--the brain is in a receptive state and is able to easily release unconscious material.
Unfortunately, countless people have written about morning pages without understanding why the pages must be written upon awakening. Writing morning pages is not like doing other free-write exercises (and the time of day isn't the only difference--Cameron has set several sensible rules for using morning pages). In order to understand the process, it's necessary to read Cameron's work, and not one of the many useless interpretations of it.
I have never done the morning pages because of a sleep disorder (or at least, that's my excuse, and so far, it has validity for me). Other people cannot do them because of the needs of children and/or pets and the absence of another adult who can perform the tasks to meet those needs). My gut feeling, though--considering what I know about the human brain--is that writing the morning pages is probably the best all-around solution to resolving any type of creative block. I still hope to undertake the project at some point.
Writer's block comes and goes. For me, there are two types of writer's block. One is the obvious type--I cannot write anything, I can't imagine how I ever wrote anything, I don't know when I will write anything again.
The other type is trickier: I can write, but I'm pushing into it, rather than having it come to me. I know what the poem is about, but I have to struggle with constructing it. When that block is absent, it's as though the poem just arrives, complete with assonance, consonance and appropriate images. In my experience, writing sonnets and blank verse gives me the best chance of having the poems just arrive for me. There's something, at least for me, about iambic pentameter that clears the way.
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