HOW DO YOU MOVE FORWARD WHEN YOU ARE BLOCKED?
A. M. HOMES: I am usually a bit like an air traffic controller: I have lots of things in the pipeline, art books, articles, films, plays, so when I am stuck, I simply shift to another format, another project. Long story short, I can’t afford to be blocked, on any level. That said, I think there’s a thing called writer’s blank, which is different from a block. The blank means that in the depths of one’s brain the soup is not soup yet, it’s not ready to happen; writing novels is a process and to do it well you have to dig deep and it takes a while for that material to be ready and available for use—not that it’s personal material, but just processing and preparing one’s thoughts on a subject or character.
ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA: My friend the Chilean poet Leonardo Sanhueza says that the best way to overcome a block is to shave and then sit and await the aftershave muses. I’ve followed his advice. I don’t always get results, but the image is more precise than it seems: I think it is good to concentrate on something else, and shaving requires absolute concentration. The risk is nothing less than cutting up your face.
RODRIGO FRESÁN: Throw myself down the stairs: no forward movement, I fall. The Law of Gravity never fails you.
PAUL AUSTER: … I have discovered, after many miserable weeks and months of suffering, that when a writer is blocked it generally means that he doesn’t know what he is trying to say. You have to go back and examine your motives, your intentions, what you are trying to accomplish. But the essential thing is not to force things merely for the sake of putting words down on the page.
AMY TAN: There are many different ways. One is to put on the same music I had on when I was last working on the scene. Music is hypnotic. It aligns all the other senses of the imagination. So that takes me there. Another way is for me to go into my journals. In there are all kinds of observations and ideas that might prompt me or are exciting and get me thinking. Sometimes I wake up at two in the morning and that’s when I write furiously and write ten pages. And when I wake up I don’t recognize the writing but sometimes I look back and I say, Oh, this is good, this needs to go into the novel. And there are other ways—including having someone that’s whipping you with a deadline. Deadlines are very effective.
STEPHEN KING: Go for more walks. Don’t take a book. Throw my mind on its own resources.
YAEL HEDAYA: I revise. I used to think 99 percent inspiration and 1 percent work. Now I know it’s the other way around. Since I’m always blocked I’m always revising. I never start from where I’ve left off the day before. I always go back to the first sentence, just checking to see that everything’s okay there, and of course I always end up cleaning things up a bit, expanding, branching out, pressing the ENTER key to move old paragraphs down the page and make room for new ones. Once I have a mass of material, say, over fifty pages, I move on to the next section. This is what I always tell my students. If you want to move forward, go back. Writing is not about leaping forward like an antelope, or some other fast, graceful creature. Writing is about moving like a crab. Sideways.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: I put the work away and start reading other books that have similar patterns. Often I find clues in other books as to how to unblock myself. Time itself helps too. I refuse to tell myself that I’m blocked. I tell myself either I’m not ready or the story’s not ready.
JOSH EMMONS: When blocked, I go over what I’ve already written and think about the narrative options and write drivel with the intention of cutting it right away and read my favorite authors and breathe mindfully to stem the panic that accompanies being blocked and knock off early and assure myself that this state won’t last forever, that sometimes my unconscious is working hard without my actually writing and that this will be beneficial in the end.
ANN CUMMINS: Running or hiking is very important to my writing process. When I get stymied in my daily writing, I go for a run and can usually come back with a few ideas. I don’t know that I’ve had writer’s block, as in “no ideas.” I’ve certainly looked at work and found absolutely no merit in it. I suppose that’s a sort of block. Then I put it away and try to forget it. Sometimes I’ll see merit when I return to it; sometimes not… It’s good to remember that the act of writing, itself, can become deadeningly routine.
RODDY DOYLE: I don’t think I’ve ever been really blocked. If things are slow or very unsatisfactory, I move to a different project, and come back to the problem later. I’ll happily write crap, knowing it’s crap, and edit it properly later. Often, we write six bad sentences before we get to the good seventh one. But we have to write the six first, before we recognize them and realize that the seventh is the true sentence. So, even the bad days are useful.
CLAIRE MESSUD: Any advice on that score would be most welcome.
MICHAEL CHABON: I just add words. Even bad words. Words that I know, as I type them, I will end up cutting. The point is to get to one thousand.
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Excerpted from the book THE SECRET MIRACLE: The Novelist's Handbook edited by Daniel Alarcón, published by Henry Holt and Company, LC. Copyright © 2010 by 826 National. All rights reserved.
