It’s hard to find the words to describe writer’s block

Never stuck for words: Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who died in 1964

 

 

Does literature have any finer representation of the brain-fog known as writer’s block than James Mortmain – aka “Father” – in Dodie Smith’s great coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle? Mortmain’s first book, Jacob Wrestling, was a critically acclaimed, if “difficult”, work, but he lost inspiration following a prison term for threatening his first wife with a cake knife. Despite the naked perambulations of his second wife, artists’ model Topaz, the Muse simply will not return. Instead, Father hides in his gatehouse room, working his way through detective novels and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s a wonderfully funny portrait of how writers possessed of sufficiently inhibiting levels of self-doubt, vanity, inertia and black dog can, despite the pleas of family and impending bankruptcy, fail to put a single word to paper.

It’s far less amusing, of course, when you are the person staring at the blank page. Fear of failure often starts the drought, and it can leave a desert so vast and arid that you can’t see anything but the graveyard of your literary ambition. When I recorded Helping Hamlet, a documentary about procrastination for Radio Four, I spoke to several highly intelligent, lauded writers, whose lives had been compromised by their inability to finish projects. It was clear the act of non-writing was inexplicable and undermining to these once-fluent authors and, on occasion, a source of deep despair.

Only this week, a coroner’s report linked the suicide of the racing correspondent James Douglas-Home to self-doubt over a new book commission. But the list of fine writers prone to such debilitating stasis is long. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dashiell Hammett, Harper Lee (whose second novel has been 54 years and counting) and Douglas Adams are testament to the fact that innate talent is no guarantee against the portcullis descending. Early success can, in itself, prove inhibiting, as it brings expectations and, all too often, alarming dependencies. Coleridge wrote when a friend despaired of his inactivity and laudanum abuse, “You bid me rouse myself – go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, & that will cure him. Alas! (he would reply) that I cannot move my arms is my Complaint & my misery.”

Finding satisfying answers to would-be life coaches forms a large part of the stuck writer’s life. Everyone has advice, and none more so than those lucky writers whose prose brims like the Nile in flood. I once overheard an author who completes each elegant thriller in six months say briskly to a tormented colleague, “The only thing to do is to sit down and write the book. Two thousand words a morning, until you’re done.” I wanted to protest, “That’s like telling an alcoholic to simply throw away their Scotch.” It’s the inability to exercise self-motivation that’s so mystifying. I’ve spent the past nine years not finishing a book and there’s barely an hour in the day when I’m not haunted by the fact, or inventing excuses for my perplexed agent. Even articles like these take three times longer for me than any competent journalist, as I stare at my screen in fear and horror.

Many writers have little sympathy for us poor blocked, though. Anthony Burgess said, “I don’t get writing blocks except from the stationer.” Philip Pullman suggested you substitute the word “plumber” for writer every time you think of citing the malaise: “Do plumbers get plumber’s block? What would you think of a plumber who used that as an excuse not to do any work that day?” I see Pullman’s point, but isn’t the joy of being a plumber the fact that it’s not an ever-more exacting ordeal to carry out ever-more brilliant work. You don’t lie awake at night feeling your entire life lacks point because your work will never be as transcendental as that of Pimlico Plumbers with their natty livery and two “National Installer of the Year” awards. I write this with feeling, as someone whose writer husband once tried to get on a plumbing course, but it was oversubscribed – one presumes with failed novelists.

The truth is that, as with all the things non-afflicted people find boring and self-indulgent (ME, synesthesia, clairvoyancy, compulsive overeating syndrome), writer’s block feels very real to the self-sabotaging author. If you’re surfing eBay when you’re supposed to be writing the next War and Peace, isn’t that as eloquent an expression of life’s lost meaning as any? It’s also worth bearing in mind that writing isn’t the only profession where a veil of darkness can descend. Composers, surgeons, soldiers and bankers can all lose faith in their abilities, but they lack the ready medium to self-aggrandise their failings. When Stephen King needed a convincing back-story for his hotel caretaker-turned-psychopath in The Shining, for example, he didn’t need to look any further than blocked novelist.


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