We Got Writer’s Block Wrong
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What is Writer’s block?
When I was only a child, I loved drawing. I used to copy anything that caught my attention; from pictures of animals to snapshots of Disney Movies, from landscapes to portraits.
When it went well, it was beautiful—not that my drawings were beautiful, the experience was—but some other times, irremediably, I would sit down, stare at the white page, cry for my mum and ask her: “What do I draw?”
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We all feel this way sooner or later in life, especially when starting something from scratch, without any instructions or limitations. The fear of the blank page, or, as it is most commonly known in my field, the writer’s block, is a scary paralysis affecting creative people doing creative work.
Like diabetes or the flu, there are certainly a number of measures you could take on board to reduce the likelihood of contracting the condition, and I shall list them all (or, at least, all the ones that work for me) in the second part of this article’s series; but the chances that, at some point, you will experience it are quite high whatever you do.
There are also tricks to get out of a rut, should you find yourself stuck in it like in quicksand; but again, I’ll list them out another time.
Whether you’re trying to prevent or cure writer’s block, though, you’re probably tackling the issue upside down.
We’ve got Writer’s block wrong
Treating writer’s block as a disease is like taking anti-acids for your stress-related indigestion. It’s a quick fix, yes, but doesn’t solve the problem.
Let me explain.
The term “Writer’s Block” comes from an Austrian psychiatrist who used it for the first time in 1947, called Edmund Bergler.
He spent years with writers suffering from “neurotic inhibitions of productivity,” trying to understand the causes and whether or not there was a cure.
After excluding a number of possible origins of the block (ranging from motivation to laziness to talent) he concluded that the creative block of those writers was nothing more than the manifestation of a psychological block and, thus, they needed therapy to go back to work.
He was a Freudian, after all.
Two psychologists, Jerome Singer and Michael Barrios from Yale University, conducted a study to find empirical evidence of the psychological block leading to writer’s block in the seventies and eighties.
Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the experiment conducted, they performed many psychological tests on their subjects and, unsurprisingly, they drew conclusions similar to the ones Bergler had found.
Writers in a rut were, also, unhappy.
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Among the blocked writers, they identified 4 main types of unhappiness leading to the same unwanted effect.
Anxiety. This mainly derived from an excess of self-criticism.
Irritation. This was mainly a pathological avoidance of comparison, due to the fear of becoming envious of others or even the fear of becoming the object of envy.
Apathy. This appeared to be the worst condition of them all. It manifested in a total inability to daydream and imagine.
Hostility. This derived from an excessive need for attention and rewards, which resulted in the depletion of creative buffers.
Instead of jumping to the same conclusion as Bergler, they kept the experiment up.
They focused on imagination and visualization capacity and asked the blocked writers to sit in a quiet room and daydream under prompts, and their results were astounding.
Create to Heal
Not only the majority of blocked writers managed to go back to work, but their registered level of unhappiness decreased.
And that’s why we got writer’s block wrong.
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Creative work of any kind is therapeutic. Jotting down ideas and knowledge helps us go through the day.
My opinion is that art is not optional for human beings. Cavemen spent time, energy and resources painting the walls of their caves. Slaves sang in the cotton fields. Soldiers read between battles.
Without creative expression, we are just gears in a machine too powerful to be stopped.
So, what’s the solution to writer’s block? Write. Write anything. Write the stupidest idea you have. Write the word Banana over and over again, as my friend Damon Wakes does in some of his published pieces of flash fiction. Fill a word document or a piece of paper with nonsense, daydream and create something, and I promise your boss will seem a little bit less of a pain in the ass.
Alla prossima.
Source: “How to Beat Writer’s Block,” by Maria Konnikova.
Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash
