Training Thought; Train of Thought: Living with Writers' Block
I've been trying to brainstorm an idea for the Living with/in Words assignment for the past month without any success. Every time I sit down to think, my brain wanders into random thoughts—irrelevant thoughts. I’ve been writing a lot the past three months (for school and work), and now I feel like I have nothing more to say—not sure if I want to say anything. I didn’t expect my thoughts to dry up. I didn’t know that words could desert me. I thought I’d always have a train of thought.
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But that train has left the station. I have writers’ block.
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A friend of mine once told me that a writing journal can help unclog the mind. I think now is a good time to try journaling. Let’s see where it takes me.
Hmmm… I don’t have much to journal right now, but I’m relieved, excited, and totally terrified. Relieved because my (only) idea for this manuscript has been approved, I’m excited because it sounds like an idea that students will relate to, and yet, I am dis-content because
I have no words.
Not one.
I need to clear my head. In Writing for Digital Cultures, Dr. Rich Shivener talked about writing as a way to clear your head. He said that when you’re stuck, write about whatever is in your head—get it all out—a.k.a free association. Once these thoughts are out, your brain will have the space to think about what you really want to write.
I want to write something that is relatable to students. But what is that something? What are these thoughts that I am unable to think through? Where are these thoughts? Ugh! I feel nauseous. My anxiety is peaking. Why is writing never easy?
Writing is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be difficult because we bare ourselves in our words and pages, which can induce fear. Conquering this fear takes courage. And in the liminality of fear and courage dwells writers’ block.
Professors and students often consider reading as an antidote for writers’ block. Reading something related to your topic will help understand the conversations in the field and reading something unrelated will activate a different side of the brain, injecting inspiration. Generally, I don’t wait for inspiration, but I’m stuck. So, I’m going to scroll and stroll in a book. Kindle, here I come!
My research on the causes of writers’ block was insightful. Robert Boice ascribed writers’ block to “procrastination, dysphoria, perfectionism, evaluation anxiety” (101), Sarah J. Ahmed and Dominik Güss attributed it to “general stress, anxiety, physical illness, affective intensity” (340) and “decreased intrinsic motivation” (341). Jenny Helin discussed her struggles with writing lived experiences, and Marshall Moore attempted to navigate “creative disconnect” (348). It felt like these authors were in my head, decoding every feeling that I was going through! But the article that arrested me was Nuno Amado’s “Psychoanalytic views of “writer’s block”: Artistic creation and its discontents."
The words in the title—"psychoanalytic” and “discontents”—struck me because I hadn’t psychoanalyzed my block, yet I was discontented with dis-content. I was so absorbed in my fear of not writing enough, not writing well enough, and not being good enough that I had forgotten to reflect on what was causing my block.
Then, a little sentence in Amado’s abstract caught my attention:
A writer who cannot write is also someone experiencing inner conflict, a self not living up to its expectations, a person that has lost the ability to play.
Inner conflict. Expectations. Loss of play.
In three phrases, Amado summed me up.
I had no idea this was me.
According to Amado, inner conflict, expectations, and loss of play may have landed me in my predicament. Let’s see how these causes relate to me.
(100)
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Inner conflict
My inners dislike conflict, and until now I’d never experienced writers’ block. I could always write; sometimes it wasn’t great writing, but words were always there. This is the first time that I have been stuck for such a long time. This is the first time that I’m conflicted inside.
Remember I said I was excited about writing this piece because students like me will relate to it? I know that this will be a great piece once it is done—may even help students overcome their own writers’ block—but it’s almost like how Amado puts it “sometimes the last thing you want is to get what you want” (101)—how very Freudian! Freud has addressed this dilemma in “Those wrecked by success” (Amado 101). He argues that “people occasionally fall ill when a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfilment” (Amado 101). But how is success measured? Is it measured by the quality or the quantity of work you’ve produced? Is it a measure of how the quality of writing is sustained in the quantity of work? For me, it’s the latter—unless I’ve maintained an exceptional quality in all my pieces, I don’t call them successful, which adds another level to my anxiety, my inner conflict. But I never thought that successful writing would cause writer’s block. I always thought more writing led to better writing led to more writing and so on. Apparently not.
Although I’m not “ill,” as Freud puts it, but this block—this inner conflict—is deep-rooted.
I have been writing (successfully) a lot this term—from homework, assignments, personal writing projects to writing for work—I haven’t had a break. My creativity may be exhausted. I know I am.
But I cannot stay “wrecked”—or wracked—by success. If my aim is to help students and myself, I must approach writing differently.
I was talking to Dr. Peter Paolucci about different ways to approach writing, and he told me that he does mundane chores around the house when suffering from writers’ block. He detests these chores so much that writing begins to look like an amazing prospect. It helps him get excited about writing again. Let’s try this method tomorrow. If nothing else, I’ll have done my laundry!
It worked! Dr. Paolucci was right about doing something different (I have more than one pair of socks now), and I was right about using multimodal settings to boost my creativity. With years of extensive writing in his arsenal, he could relate to my situation, and help me understand expectations.
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Expectations
The burden of expectation comes from my instructors, my current self, my legacy self (what will I think about this work a year from now), and past performance here at York. I’ve received good grades at university, and I’ve even won a few awards. My instructors (also my primary audience) probably know this (or now they do), which raises their expectations of me, and amplifies the expectations I have for myself. It’s a vicious cycle! I recognize that I’ve worked hard to get there, and those achievements drive me to do better. But they are also a curse. The compound effect of audience expectation is debilitating.
Audience expectation impacts all writers. Striving to meet those expectations can be exhausting for some and fun for others. But expectation is expectation. How can it elicit two different reactions from writers?
The answer lies in what Amado calls “presentation of the self” (102). Confident, experienced writers who don’t struggle with blocks may find it easier to present their authentic selves. But a question like how do I want the audience to perceive me? can overwhelm student writers when their audience is a professor because of all the expectations I mentioned earlier, especially when combined with writers’ block. This angle adds a whole other layer of anxiety for student writers. We fear that “writing can change our relationship with others [our instructors]” (102) and ourselves. We fear that we may divulge our truth through writing and people may not accept it (we may not accept ourselves). Or simply that our work may not be good enough.
I didn’t struggle when writing for a student audience and that’s because we can be ourselves with and relate to other students. Weird, eh?
But hey, I found a solution in one of the papers I read last week. In “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”, Peter Elbow tells us that it is not necessary to constantly think of the audience when we are in the drafting process, especially if the audience is a hindrance to our creative flow.
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Write first and when you are ready, revise it to your audience’s specifications (52). That way, at least you will have all your ideas on paper and can smoothen things in the editing process.
I had no idea that we could approach writing this way too! Elbow made me realize that editing is where the real creative play begins.
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Loss of Play
But what happens when we lose the ability to play?
And what does “play” mean in the context of writing? It means accessing a part of you that resides outside the confines of convention—conventions of words, of space, of creativity. Much like Dr. Shivener, Paula Scher talks about playing as free association. She does her best work in taxicabs when her subconscious takes over—the play mode. In this mode, you let your subconscious engage with the visceral experiences around you. She may be talking about typography, but I find it relevant to writing too.
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I had no idea that I could use my environment—the visceral experiences around me—to think non-linearly. As students we are often so focused on a topic or a course or readings that we disregard our environment. We forget the possibility of connecting ideas and learnings from different courses. This video from my Mechanics of Style class offered a different approach to writing. Such connections can help us move when we’re stuck. They can rekindle our inspiration. You never know when and where a new idea will strike you.
All I need to do now is take a deep breath. Exhale. Pack my things and go where I can absorb everything I see, hear, and feel, where I can erase my dis-content, and create content. I need to go play. For Paula, it is taxicabs; for me it is cafes.
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I understand that under the burden of inner conflict and expectations, a state of play can be difficult. But writing must be a tool to think with—to agree and disagree with, scratch out ideas, tear pages, write new ideas, underline and highlight, and even doodle if bored—to see with, to hear with, to sense with.
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I had an idea.
I wrote the words.
We must stop thinking of writing as the breaker of brains. The pressure to string words into logical, sensible ideas that flow may drain our creative process and make writing a chore. The pressure is worse if we don’t have ideas, or our ideas make no sense, or they don’t flow anywhere. If we treat the act of writing as a threat, we will always be afraid of words. If we think of writing in black and white, our ideas will never colour the world. We must realize that
the colour is within us—behind all the black and white; we just need to let it flow.
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Yes, writing can be a regurgitative tool to help clear the mind. Unfortunately, for many, brain vomit invites writers’ block because we have been conditioned to think before we write, to only pen down cohesive, coherent thoughts, which results in a staring contest with our word processors.
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We must change our approach to writing if we want to change our relationship with writing and overcome writers’ block. If we approach writing as only a tool to pen fully formed ideas that already exist in our mind, we will be chained by inner conflict, expectations, and the inability to play. But if writing becomes our ally, the clogs will disappear, the fears will disappear, writers’ block will disappear.
We must stop training our thoughts to sustain trains of thoughts.
Writers' block is the abyss between our thoughts and articulating those thoughts. If we try to train our thoughts before we’ve even penned them down, we will doubt our ideas, our words, ourselves. We must stop training our thoughts to sustain a train of thought: to sustain a train of thought, we must rise above our dis-content, and prioritize our ideas over others’ expectations. We must let go of our inhibitions—our inner conflicts—and invite our ideas to inhabit—to colour—our space.
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Let’s unblock our minds. Let’s open ourselves to play.