I'm in a thoroughly bad mood now, and if I put it all into a blog, I'd end up having to go out on the street with a bag over my head, because my millions of readers would fear that laser beams of hate would shoot out of my eyes. I'm comforting myself with the knowledge that I'm generally in a sour mood after a night of serious drinking, and last night, with its beautiful beginning of summer heat, was my first night of the year at the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden. Anyway, after a morning of slow moving and the belated realization that I'd fiddled around until about 3 PM when I went out in search of lunch, I wrote a long sour post about everything wrong in the world and my place in it, and then deleted it.
Anyway, one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place was to help with my writer's block. I've been reading two books on the subject lately, the first Rita Emmit's bestselling "Procrastinator's Handbook", the second Alice Flaherty's reassuringly clinical "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain."
The former lost me just a few pages in when Emmit talked about a client of hers who wanted to put up motivational posters, but just couldn't find the time, only to find that he could do it in just a lunch break, and that he found, when he did it, "everyone loved the beauty and spirit of the prints," which makes me wonder if Emmit's ever been near an actual office in her life, or just depends on the descriptions of the management types who can afford her seminars. When I see big photos of eagles with the words underneat about how rare true leaders are, the only thing I feel motivated to do is update my resume.
Snarkiness aside, the book has some good practical advice, most of which I haven't followed, a good quarter of which I've forgotten, but without it I wouldn't have remembered to get a new set of keys, without which I would have been a true pickle when my crappy fake letter jacket developed a pocket leak. And I have used stuff from the book to work better at the office.
Flaherty's book isn't a help guide, it's an exploration of the mind's desire to write, and it's gorgeously written and clear headed. It starts out with her description of how she developed overwhelming, life wrecking hypergraphia (opposite of writer's block, compulsion to write at all time) after post partum depression. Somehow she's able to clinicize writing and its desire without reducing its mystery or beauty- when she talks about the similarities between a creative brainstorm and an epileptic seizure, she makes the both of them seem more miraculous, not less so. I read the book and I want to write just to explore the neurological states that writing brings up, good and bad.
I'm only a third of the way through the book, and I've just gotten now to the part on writer's block. She describes it as generally being localized, and writers pouring out letters while being stuck at page one of their novels, but in my experience when a really paralyzing block strikes, it strikes everywhere. I feel like at various points through the last few years it's been close to swimming through tapioca to compose an e-mail to a friend, to post on a discussion forum, to even put together a simple set of technical instructions. Lately, it's been better, for reasons I won't get into here, and I can definitely write more than I used to- I walked into this Starbucks fully intending to work on one of my two plays for a workshop tomorrow, but instead, I've written two of these blog entries, and the words just seem to flow out. And I really should get to those other things before the Sopranos comes on.
I'll leave with an excerpt from Joseph Conrad about his block (Flaherty quotes this from his letters):
I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can't write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read...I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the ocntents of my head. My story is there in a fluid — in an evading shape. I can't get hold of it. It is all there — to bursting, yet I can't get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water...
