Writer’s Block –

Is It For Real, for Torture, or Evolution

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
  “And every single one of them is right!” 

Despite the plaints of academics and a cottage industry of professional editors, Rudyard Kipling was right. In 1907, he was the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he is still, at age 41, the youngest writer to receive it.

To my mind, he was and is one hell of a story-teller. My moral betters, no doubt, would call him an imperialist or a colonizer, although his evocation in KIM of India set against the backdrops of the Great Game and the Himalayas, is a love song to a great nation. Nevertheless, he has largely been erased by, as I said, my moral superiors.

That erasure may be why so many science fiction writers like him so much. They erase us too. But he still has the Nobel Laureate that Ursula K. Le Guin failed to win. And no doubt, he’ll come back into favor.

Of course, the usual experts will proclaim “That’s not true,” meaning that I should STFU and let them pontificate before admiring fans, spouses, and other hangers-on that lone-wolf writers tend not to get.

But let’s get back to that

Hell of a writer. Nine and sixty ways, yes. Same thing applies to writer’s block.

Of course, the usual moral experts decide “that’s not true.” Whereupon I should STFU and let them talk while admiring fans, wives, and other hangers-on that lone wolves mostly don’t get to have listen.

I don’t think so.

But let’s get back to those nine and sixty ways. It’s occurred to me that there are also nine and sixty ways of developing and coping with writer’s block.

The damn thing exists. Some writers do not have it. That’s a gift. Some of them are mean enough to say writer’s block is all in our heads, rather like a misogynist OB-GYN of either gender scolding women for menstrual cramps.

But writer’s block exists. There are many shapes and forms of it, and it can be serious. Never mind the actual text – what smarmy people call “wordsmithing.”

I know one extremely eminent writer of adult fantasy and children’s mysteries who received tremendous kudos for a superb short story and promptly blocked because this writer thought that any subsequent work had not only to be up to that story’s standard – which it would have been – but received with the same acclaim. And writers have no control over that.

Another writer – a Grand Master, in fact – told a horror story of a writer who could not follow up on an extremely successful project no matter how hard he tried – and he tried. It drove him to suicide.

And we all knew when Isaac Asimov could no longer write his columns for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that his time was very short. We were right.

I’m not talking nonfiction. If you’re doing corporate writing, as I did for almost 40 years, the words have to go into the keyboard and onto the screen and over to the people who are going to screw them up and tell you of your inadequacies. You will be well paid. But you will pay for it. And you cannot afford writer’s block for this sort of thing, not if you want to keep holding your job.

Forty years of it. Been there. Done that. Free at last.

I’ve been writing fiction for more than forty years. In the course of a misspent career I’ve produced 30 books of various shapes, collaborations, and forms. I’ve published over 120 pieces of short fiction. I’ve been published internationally and received award nominations. Not wins, mind you, but the likes of me cannot expect those. I’ve created a bio, a resume, and a curriculum vitae so formidable that girlbosses and managers have tried to trip me up for falsifying my resumes. I’ve laughed in their faces and walked out.

And yet, throughout my life, I have been subject to writer’s blocks that, in some cases, have lasted for years.

Sometimes, it’s just emotional and physical exhaustion, including the Dread Writer’s Pretzelback, which is what you get for crouching over your keyboard for hours at a time.

Other times, however, I fear writer’s block the way I used to fear job-hunting.

At present, I am in the throes of a major productive phase. This gives me the confidence to look at writer’s block, especially the sorts that afflict me, analytically. In some ways, writer’s block is a lifelong protection and an evolutionary process. We can add that to Kipling’s nine and sixty ways.

I started writing very, very young. My parents liked my poetry. I may have lisped in numbers before the numbers came. I was good at metrics. But looking back on what I wrote before I was ten, I realize it was the sort of sentimental stuff that only a parent could love. Did they? I failed wretchedly when my mother wanted something cute for a baby shower. I don’t do cute. I have never done cute. I will never do cute.

So, I was an unsatisfactory poet. I stopped. Besides, I really am better at prose/.

When the block dissipated, I started writing short stories, again well before age 10. This proved to be another bad idea. I was not outside. I was not socializing. I was coming up with ideas that made my parents think I was not – sniffle choke – a Hap-py Child even though I did have my moments of pure joy. At the same time, I was an only child of older parents in the 1950s. I was being brought up aspirationally in an era of mass conformity. And I had my own thoughts on the subject, even back then, and I could be disastrously candid, sometimes in the presence of relatives. When you combine that with a socialization toward people pleasing, the cognitive dissonance is a real bitch.

I’m not saying my parents were altogether wrong. My Dad was a first generation science fiction reader, but I wasn’t ready to tackle that. My mother wanted A Happy Child and, more’s the pity, she not only had perfect musical pitch, she read subtext fluently even before it afflicted English departments. Sensibly, I hid my work to spare myself smarmy read-alouds. I tried to keep a diary, but was told, “you know, in detective stories, girls who keep diaries get murdered.” Scratch that.

Ultimately, there proved to be much too much feedback to someone was being brought up as a people pleaser and not doing all that well at it. The last time I heard the reproachful and sarcastic “Are you writing your heart out?” I blocked.

As a teen, I started up again. Are you seeing a pattern in this? Each time I restarted, I did so with better and better technical equipment. This time, I tried science fiction. I tried a novel. It was awful, simply dreadful, but it is something for a 13-year-old to produce chapter after chapter, especially under fire to become well-adjusted.

You’d have thought I was writing LOLITA or something else that could bring CPS bounce down upon the family. Besides, I had college to get into. I blocked again, to focus on the future I wanted.

In college and grad school, I kept on blocking. As a nascent SF writer, I wrote unsuitable things. Besides, I was too busy absorbing data, like an academic sponge.

My last year of my Ph.D. program, the writing sneaked out in the form of reviews and the start of another dreadful novel. Two other dreadful novels, now mercifully disappeared. Just their existence was subjected to merciless feedback. Not because they were as bad as they were, but because I dared at all before “excellence in teaching had been achieved” and before I became tubercular, nineteenth-century, male, and/or dead.

Half a century later, I know that completing novels and short fiction with no encouragement and considerable opposition in my mid twenties was a considerable achievement. Starting to sell the short stuff was even more.

When I moved to New York and took the first of a series of financial writing and editing jobs, I was stupid enough to mention my writing. “It’s a distract,” said one Chief Operating Officer at a boutique firm. “Are you just passing through? Are you careless because you have your very own editor?”

By this time, I was writing and selling regularly. Once again, I emerged from a period of writer’s block with far better technical skills, and I realized something important. I don’t just own my writing. I have ferocious ownership. Change it, and I freak out. In financial services writing, you’re supposed to produce something that will anticipate the C-suite’s thoughts, such as they are. And then they change it all around, and it’s your fault for not doing it that way in the first place. One remittance man took peculiar delight in tormenting me because I couldn’t develop the “knock” for press releases his way. One thin-lipped, thin-hipped Queen Bee who inherited me from a manager with whom I worked well made certain to drive me away. Her first year on the job, she racked up a personnel turnover rate of 150 percent, and I am not making that up.

By this time, I had hit my stride as a writer. I was writing well and consistently, although with attacks of exhaustion from time to time. I found myself a writers’ community and realized that writing was what I was for when it wasn’t being begrudged to me. After all, I saw that I was lucky to be able to write. I wasn’t one of the people privileged to be encouraged. I panicked at the thought of workshops and beta readers and classes. And I was working two jobs—the corporate job heavily feedbacked by the writers, and the actual fiction.

Nevertheless, as they said about an alumna of my graduate university, I persisted.

But it came to a head in 2006, the year I lost two major publishers, my job, and my nerve. I did have what they call options: a good severance package; three ideas for major books; the opportunity for outplacement to help me get another corporate job. I used the severance and the outplacement. I was told that to even be considered for another book, I must write a complete novel on spec and preferably with a pseudonym, and had I considered writing anything more modern and unconventional?

You bet I blocked. This time, however, I didn’t just block. I stopped. I wasn’t going to do this anymore. This one lasted for more than a decade. It was rough. I missed it.

Ceasing to write what you love is a bad idea. It really screws you up for corporate writing or any other corporate work too.

I managed until, thank God, I was able to retire.

And then, once my sleep deficit was more or less assuaged, once my nerves didn’t jangle like a broken violin string while playing Giuseppi Tartini’s fearsomely difficult “Devil’s Trill” sonata, the writing came back.

This time, it came back screamingly hungry, honed by the discipline I learned in financial services to sit there and produce copy regardless, buttressed by the academic training to research and organize, and just because my instincts started to say “yes.”

I am still getting ghosted a lot. I am still getting rejected. I am also selling more than I have ever sold before. My writing now is more versatile, more clear, less prone to a resident addiction to compound/complex sentences. I still have ferocious ownership of my work. I still can only write what I damn well feel like writing, but my range has widened.

I may not be writing the right stuff for today’s busy editors, but I’m writing the right stuff for me. This most recent attack of writer’s block has proved less of a block than a chrysalis.

I don’t know whether it’s going to produce beautiful butterflies or moths, but I do know that it’s mine, all mine because I have learned, to swipe from Churchill, the things up with which I will not put.

I respect professional editors, but if a busy busy busy agent won’t look at my MSS before it’s professionally and expensively edited, I move on. I see grateful and loving acknowledgments to writers’ workshops (many for pay), beta readers, and writers’ groups. Pay money to be psyched out and torn apart and then quilted into someone else’s methodology? That’s not me. I can’t. I just can’t. I grew up on Heinlein’s dictum that the only person for whom you revise is the editor who’s going to pay you.

I much prefer to make my own mistakes. If I fail, I fail. If I succeed, I did it my way.

Given the blocks and the feedback and the years of going fallow, I think it’s a wonder I’ve produced anything, much less produced so much. Do I wish I’d had the backing a a much younger writer to do what I meant to? Do I wish I had support rather than the doubts and criticism with which I grew up? Would I have killed to have a strong sense that writing was the thing I was entitled to do, not just the thing I was damn well going to do? Hell yes.

It’s left its mark. Yes, I daresay that given those advantages, I coulda been a contenduh. As Aslan says, that is some other writer’s story.

Instead, I am only a writer. And it almost seems like more than enough.

I’m not saying to embrace your writer’s block. But if it happens, see if you can spin straw into gold and turn that block into an evolutionary process.

And maybe not mix my metaphors as much as in that prior paragraph.

Today, I edited and sent off an 8800 word short story. I wrote this Substack column. My shoulders are turning into pretzels the size of the ones you buy in Central Park.

This isn’t block. It’s exhaustion. And it feels just great.