On Writer's Block / On Bad Writing Advice / Breakthroughs

1. On Writer’s Block

    For a long time I was the sort of person who said he didn’t believe in writer’s block. I know that I’m prone to saying provocative things mostly for the purpose of getting a rise out of people — one that always gets a doubletake from people is when I say that I don’t believe in authenticity — but this actually wasn’t that. From the age of maybe twelve until I graduated college, I never once had difficulty writing. I filled notebook upon notebook — all of them mercifully lost, now — with song lyrics, poems, personal observations. It wasn’t journaling. I don’t find journaling to be a very useful activity most of the time (it usually just devolves into complaining). I said I was emulating the poet William Stafford, who got up every morning and wrote a poem before starting the day, but I don’t think that was really accurate. On some level, I think it was just that I was a kid and was fairly sure most of my thoughts were really important, revolutionary thoughts that should be written down. It was also incredibly good practice. Though I can go through things I’ve written and find the style refining, warping based on the venue or the subject matter, a lot of the fundaments of how I write were formed long ago, in the crucible of little spiral notebooks that I spent hours and hours scribbling in. The discursiveness, the use (overuse?) of the M-dash, the high-low balancing act of poetry and dialect — those have all been there for a long time. I’m glad I wrote like that for all those years, just as I am glad I lost most of the shit I wrote back then. But it gave me unrealistic expectations.

    The poems dried up right after I graduated, when I was living in a little house with a couple of old friends from college. I wrote almost nothing at all for several years. I didn’t think of this as writer’s block at the time (in fact I thought of it as being a total failure), but I think that’s what it was. I tried to write a couple of novels, but I didn’t really have an idea for one. I tried submitting my poetry for publication, but after a while that started to seem phony and I quit. I didn’t really get back in the swing of things until the summer of 2005, when I finished Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince and then began penning a fanfic version of the seventh book that eventually sprawled to 90 pages. That uncorked something, and soon I was writing a novel of my own. It wasn’t very good, but it was writing. Within a few years I was publishing stories. After a while I got to grad school, and really developed what I think of as my adult style. I had a couple of realizations: I don’t have much interest in writing Literary Fiction of the sort that I was raised on — formless, muted stuff about people never quite saying what they mean. I don’t mind reading it (sometimes), but the fact is that writing it makes me sleepy. And so there will always be an element of science fiction, or crime, or weird adventure, to everything I write. I’m happy about that. I don’t want to be Raymond Carver anymore.

    But the bouts of block have come and gone ever since. I’ll go months in which the only things I write are blog posts and emails. (I am known as a sender of long emails. I dated a woman for a while who thought my long emails were an enormous pain in the ass, and frankly stated that she didn’t read them. No wonder we didn’t last.) Sometimes, I don’t even write that much. (To wit: the last month on this blog.) I’ve been trying to convince myself that these periods of not-writing are actually useful. There’s a sort of subconscious cognition going on, I think. After I finished the disastrous second draft of my second novel, I spent an entire summer mostly worrying that I wasn’t a writer anymore. Then, in two months, I vomited out about 50,000 words, and finished the thing. I had no sense during the long, uncertain summer that I was actually cutting the gordian knot of my novel. But not even an old bloviator like me can just make up the second half of a book he’s been working on for almost seven years on the spot. Something subconscious must have happened.

    So maybe I still don’t believe in writer’s block, now that I think about it. Maybe I’m always writing, in one sense. It’d be nice if I could avoid losing all confidence in myself and feeling like a fraud during the periods when I’m not actually putting pen to paper, though.

2. On Bad Writing Advice

    There’s a lot of bad writing advice in the world, but I think my least favorite was the kind I heard on the podcast A Way with Words this Monday. The hosts kept going on and on about how writing should be kept simple, and how they tell their kids that they should be aiming below the top of their register most of the time, blah blah blah, and I gotta say — this is bad advice. I mean, here on the bloggy pages, we’re mostly chatting, so I’m not digging about for my most complex sentences and recondite vocabulary. But I think that the emphasis on simplicity can be oppressive, and make a lot of writing dull and flat — in short, Strunk & White were not right. Their reign of terror must end. Unsheathe your semicolons, young writers of America. Be aware that the passive voice has uses on occasion. And, for the love of God, have some fucking fun. Writing should not feel like the act of pulling against a leash.

3. Breakthroughs

    I have felt for a while now that I was on the verge of turning into a new, better person than I’ve been for most of my adult life. This isn’t really in evidence in my actual life — I still get depressed, I still drink more than I probably should, I’m still short-tempered and confrontational sometimes, and I still flee from relationships the instant they threaten to turn complicated or serious — but I’ve had this feeling, like a stone in my stomach, that I was about to break through some kind of imaginary wall and find myself in a sunnier, warmer, more sweet-smelling world. I can’t tell you why. I think that part of it is just feeling prepared to actually do things differently. Try the metacognition necessary to understand why I have been the way I’ve been, what steps I can take to change the things that can actually be changed, and what I’m just going to have to accept about myself.

    This blog has been a part of that project, at least sometimes. One of the reasons I decided to lean into some of the uncomfortable stuff — especially the stuff about race that I was writing about over the summer — was that I had a sense that being honest about it was the only way to get it sorted out. I’ve had the experience of really stepping in shit on this front, almost entirely out of the cluelessness that’s born of growing up white in a mostly-white place like Portland. I felt like the only way to sort out my embarrassment, and try to move forward as a smarter, more mindful person, was to write about it. And in public. Because embarrassment and shame sometimes metastasizes into something altogether worse. Though I didn’t think I was in danger of turning into a reactionary, I wanted to see if talking about it out loud would somehow inoculate me against that. (Answer: the only way that’s going to work is to keep writing about it, whenever it comes up. There’s never a time when you’ve “cured” yourself of racism and bias.)

    But there are other ways in which it hasn’t been, not in the way I had hoped it would be. There are good reasons for some of that — I learned the hard way that you shouldn’t write about people you date casually in a place where they might find it — but a lot of it has been the old fear: of being known. I don’t want anybody to know me too well, because then they would understand just how awful I really am. I’ve already confessed to being entitled and motivated by fear and full of rage and judgement and sometimes pointlessly cruel. I wouldn’t want anybody to know the really bad stuff. And I wouldn’t want anybody to have a store of examples.

    But the breakthrough, if it’s going to happen, will have to be a process of becoming. I’m never actually going to bust down that wall and come over all rosy one night. And so here, at the bottom of this post, I’m going to start a new tradition: I will keep myself accountable, and in public. Maybe that will help.

Goals, short-term

Limit myself to two beers, except on special occasions

No smoking. Period. (I’ve been pretty good about this the last few weeks.)

Read for at least an hour every day.

Never have a day on which I don’t leave my apartment.

Goals, long-term

No more dating women I don’t really like.

Try not to feel like I’m too broken to stay with women I do like.

Try to monetize my writing better.