WRITER'S BLOCK

It’s one of the oldest clichés: the awful silence; the blank page, glaring and menacing; the lonely writer driven to despair by the keyboard’s mute mockery. The image is powerful – just like all myths.

            But there’s no such thing as writer’s block. No writer worthy of the name is ever unable to write something. Writing is a kind of mania: it happens to you whether you want it to or not. “Wanting to be a writer” is a daydream indulged by people with other things to do.

Like any other mania, it alienates people upon whose understanding you may have presumed. Like any other mania, it will drag you by the hair to an absurd peak and show you the view; then – just when you’ve begun to feel safe in your own omniscience – it will dig its fingers into your throat, fuck you with a broom handle and hurl you from the precipice. Like any other mania, you either manage it or you don’t.

            No, the blank page doesn’t frighten real writers. The truly terrifying thing is the full page. Writer’s block, if there is such a thing, isn’t the inability to write – it’s the utter certainty that nothing you have written is of any use to anybody. Or that it will hurt someone you’d rather you didn’t.

            Great writing is like music. From the ether it springs, perfect in pitch and rhythm. Sensuous, unintellectual, it enters the mind only via the soul. By the alchemy of the word it transforms impressions into experience, evoking, transporting, caressing. It makes the general specific, and the personal universal.

            Good writing is like sculpture. The muse of merely good writing is Memory. A sleight of hand, it tricks the mind into seeing and feeling. You start with an ugly, unformed mass then pare away layers until something beautiful, recognisable, or at least functional is revealed. This is the hard kind of writing, but you keep chiselling away until you’re satisfied.

            No writer worthy of the name is ever satisfied.