The art of the coddiwomple (or, “writer’s block” revisited)
Properly interpreted, a block is the best thing that can happen to a writer.
Recently my boyfriend suggested we spend part of a Saturday afternoon at a Friends of the Library book sale. Let me loose in a large roomful of secondhand books and will I meander happily, contenting myself with whatever treasures I stumble upon, like a normal person? Of course not. I convince myself that there is ONE book in this room that, the MOMENT I crack the spine, will make me feel as though the author thrust it out into the world ESPECIALLY for ME.
After awhile, I found myself in the self-help section. Of course I did.
I spotted a book on writer’s block. That was the title, actually: On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity. Early-to-mid ’90s, to judge by the cover. Victoria Nelson.
I opened to a page at random:
I have never felt so seen by a book in my entire life.
In late October 2022, I sent my agent a 360-page partial manuscript. (Yes, partial. It was supposed to be the first third. LOLsob.) In early December my agent emailed me her notes, pointing out (with her customary diplomacy) that this new work lacked a taut narrative through-line. It had no through line, in fact. I’d written some of the best prose of my career thus far, AND YET the pages I had given her amounted to a free-wheeling grab-bag o’ chaos.
I have spent this past year working out how to fix my plot. I’ve remembered my beginner’s mind, gobbling up craft books, essays, and workshop videos on narrative structure. I’ve read for research. I’ve taken several breaks to begin developing other novel ideas. I wrote fragments of scenes I felt certain belonged in the new draft. But for the first time in a very long time, flow was elusive. In A Bright Clean Mind I wrote about the powerful rush of ideas I received right after I chose to become an ethical vegan in the spring of 2011, and though I still believe that what we eat can exacerbate our anxiety, I now know it can’t be as simple as that. Because after twelve years of “easy” purely-plant-fueled click-click-click novel-writing, I had to admit that I was “blocked” again.
The situation is unprecedented. In the old days (2002--2011), my “block” would manifest in a very particular pattern of multiple false starts in between viable novel projects, which I called “trough periods,” and I never wrote more than fifty or eighty pages of a novel I would later abandon. This time I am hundreds of pages into the novel in question, the time-travel screwball dramedy that’s been in the works for over fifteen years. Leaving a novel idea on my mental back burner was my tried-and-true M.O. for a long, long time. After a few months’ “marination,” for example, the whole plot of Mary Modern slotted itself into place in a single instant, double love triangle, twist, and all. If I didn’t know what was going to happen next I would write my way into the answer, but that hasn’t happened this time. Earlier this year I read a ghost story set at the Winchester Mystery House, and I LOLsobbed at the description of the “staircase to nowhere.” Some days that’s exactly what working on this book has felt like.
Connie Willis, who is one of my favorite writers, said in a 2021 interview, “Early on, I thought, someday soon I’ll figure this out and then writing will be a breeze, but that’s never happened. Every story and novel has a whole different set of things you need to learn how to do. It’s like you’re starting from scratch every time.” I thought I knew how to plot a novel, but to be precise about it, I knew how to plot Mary Modern, and Petty Magic, and so on. With the time-travel novel, I am (almost) starting from zero.
Most advice I hear or read about “writer’s block” identifies fear as the root cause. This is either so obvious as to be completely unhelpful, or in my case, only like 3.5% accurate. I’ve written about so-called “block” on the blog before, but I tailored that advice (still valid, I think) for beginners. Comparing myself to other writers hasn’t been an issue for me for a long time now, and I can catch myself whenever I’m on the verge of trying too hard. The concerns and underlying conditions are (for the most part) quite different when you’re twenty-five years in.
So here is a distillation of the lessons of the past year—a run-down of the practices, attitude adjustments, and pertinent reminders that have actually helped—with some beautifully-worded assistance from my new friend Victoria Nelson, whose book, in a kinder world, would still be in print.
Self-flagellation never (EVER!!!) leads to the desired outcome.
[M]aking art isn’t in every case an act superior to not making art. That belief comes out of the same production-quota mentality that most writers adopt at any moment in their lives when they are not actually producing something.
Why do we conflate discipline and punishment? The usual perpetrators—Puritans and capitalists—but you’ve already heard that rant, so I’ll just say it’s a tendency that warrants continual observation. Nelson writes that discipline arises naturally out of honoring one’s deepest preferences, which is an elegant way to reframe such an unjustly tarnished concept.
Some authors write three to five (or more) novels per year and say they never experience block. They’re probably telling the truth. But the sort of writing they do draws upon a rather different skill set.
You will be so busy calling yourself unprofessional that you will not be able to hear the lower-pitched inner voice that is attempting to explain the real problem.
Once I become aware of my inner-monologuing about being a professional and professionals doing the work no matter what and why can’t I GET! IT! DONE! when I have literally no other responsibilities, I label this self-directed trash-talk as problematizing, then ask myself: what is the flawed premise underneath this pointless gnashing of teeth? Here is what I needed to remember:
1. Met or exceeded, a daily wordcount protects us—we believe it protects us—against all those old insecurities, the I’ll never be good enough and the who the hell do I think I am. A wordcount legitimizes—again, seems to legitimize—not just our efforts, but our very conception of self. Writers write, right? I used to share Bukowski’s poem “air and light and time and space” with my workshop students, but now I have to wonder if the message isn’t halfway toxic. Not every reason is an excuse, and an intuitive writer can instantly tell one from the other. Raising three kids on welfare is actually a TERRIFIC excuse, ya know?! For the hypothetical aspiring-writer/mom living on public assistance, that is the season she’s in.
2. As embarrassing as it is to have to admit this, there is a part of me that is still smarting at my jerk flatmate back in 2008 making a shitty comment about my hanging around the house all day. (When I offered to show him my books, he declined.) I moved out of that apartment as soon as was feasible, and yet that aggressively unimaginative individual is still living rent free in some dank little broom closet in my brain.
Someone who is not a writer will probably not understand that the work of writing often does not involve the act of writing. Notice that I did not choose the word “sometimes”—I chose “OFTEN” because that has been my experience from day one. I’ve joked that writers are always working and never working, and I still think that’s pretty accurate. I just need to remember that in this context, “never working” means “writing is usually enjoyable,” although it’s not a problem when it’s not, and “always working” means “I get many of my best ideas while I’m doing the dishes.” Therefore, doing the dishes counts towards work-time logged. (Not that I’m keeping a spreadsheet.)
So like I said, the Rx for me here is to recognize—not “fix,” just notice—my cultural programming around what does and doesn’t look like work from the outside.
Even when things are going swimmingly, the desired outcome ALWAYS takes longer than you expect, so either adjust your expectations accordingly or chuck them altogether.
Your long-term productivity will increase in direct proportion to the care and acceptance you lavish on your short-term silences.
In a 2014 interview Connie Willis said, “My two-volume novel BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR took eight years to write, DOOMSDAY BOOK took five, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG four. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Every story basically takes your whole career to write, both in the skills you acquire and where the stuff comes from that the stories are about.” Skills take years to sharpen. Research can take a long time too. I like “short-term silence” formatted like so—“short*-term silence”—because a “short” period of time could be a week, a year, or a decade. It’s all relative, right? The only long-term silence is death.
Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT.
To underscore another point I’ve already made:
“Scratching” counts as work.
This is the choreographer Twyla Tharp’s term for exploratory activity—some light research into whatever topic has stimulated your curiosity today, or reading in an unfamiliar genre, listening to music, or looking at other people’s art—that you engage in either before you’ve settled on your next project, or when you feel stuck. More broadly defined, scratching is anything you do in lieu of giving into despair. (Am I being facetious? Ask me again tomorrow.)
For more on the concept of scratching, check out another blog post from my friend Heather. Also, the 2014 Connie Willis interview (here’s the link again) includes a scratching case study.
Treat yourself as a whole human being. You probably have needs that supersede your desire to feel productive.
The key to the dilemma lies not in any failure of will power—blocked writers tend to have more than their fair share of will—but in the relationship we have cultivated with our unconscious selves. This is the unpleasant moment when we learn that this invisible but inalienable inner kingdom runs on its own priorities—priorities that are not always or even often the same as those we hold consciously.
I found a new therapist at the beginning of this year, and my general outlook is so much clearer and brighter for our our twice-monthly sessions. She asks questions that draw dotted lines between my present habits and longstanding emotional patterns, leaving me space to develop the insights for myself. For instance, when she characterized my childhood creative practices as a “life vest”—“Who would you have been without your drawing and writing? What would have been your experience of life?”—it occurred to me that I couldn’t have called myself a happy child, and that I might very well have been diagnosed with depression. (As it was, I had some fairly weird psychosomatic symptoms—foot pain, back pain, fingernails falling out, etc., no vitamin deficiencies or anything like that—and because of those symptoms and persistent insomnia, my parents took me to see a series of mental health professionals.) My daily sketches and what-ifs were an effective coping strategy in the fallout from my parents’ vicious divorce, but it was also A LOT of pressure to put on my creativity—a pressure I might still be experiencing here in the present.
The truth is that this is no passive condition; it is an aggressive reaction, a loud shout from the unconscious calling attention to the fact that something is out of adjustment. The block itself is not the problem; it is a signal to adjust the way we approach our work.
I’m not necessarily implying YOU need therapy to “work through” your “block,” but it’s worth looking into. (Also, if you already have a therapist but responded with a sense of longing to what I wrote about mine, it might be time to look for a new one.)
Consider that something else wants to come through.*
(*This is not a poop joke, although joking about poop will probably help with your “blockage.”)
I know a bunch of people in the self-help space have posed the following question, but my favorite source is Campbell Walker (a.k.a. Struthless): “In what respects might this challenging situation be ‘the best thing that ever happened to you’?” I am aware this could be a very callous thing to ask in certain contexts, but “writer’s block” isn’t one of them.
If I had to choose one item on this list that is pretty much one-size-fits-all, this is it. (Also, yes, find a good therapist.) I asked myself, “If I put the time-travel novel in long-term time-out, what other book(s) could I write instead?” My attitude here wasn’t “well, all right, I might as well think about writing something else.” It was
I made space in my head for the unexpected. And what do you know? I got one dynamite idea after another.
Here is a reproduction of a diagram I’ve been adding to periodically as yummy new book concepts occur to me:
Okay, so I am probably not going to write all of these books (“ruthless realism,” remember!) It doesn’t matter. They are all viable book ideas, and I could get started on at least three of them right now. (And in fact, I have! I know this “block” is specific to the time-travel novel because when I switch to another project I find myself back in flow-state within minutes, although the other novel I’m working on right now has a relatively simple plot.)
Funny thing: if we assess my 2023 productivity using the volume of new-project material as our sole metric, I’ve actually been very prolific. With the number of viable book ideas I’ve come up with this year along with the ones I already had simmering on my mental back burners, I have enough to work on for the next fifteen to twenty years. (And I got ANOTHER idea, craft book #4, right after I uploaded the diagram photo!)
(But what if you throw up your hands and yell “HELL YEAH, UNIVERSE!”…and nothing happens?)
…[T]he active internal state Keats called ‘delicious diligent indolence,’ the silence that falls in the house of art while an idea is developing out of sight, down in the basement.
Let’s talk more about scratching. Heather and I passed a very happy few days in Grand Marais in the spring of 2022, where we browsed around an art gallery stocking this greeting card from a local letterpress:
Coddiwomple is a marvelous word, isn’t it? I can’t remember if either of us said, “Ooh, look! It’s the Fool!”, but we were definitely thinking it. The Fool is card number zero, the very start of the 22-card journey of the Major Arcana. This is a good card for the enthusiastic beginner, but its message is even more relevant for a person of experience who may need to find their way back into a possibility mindset. How can you travel purposefully if you don’t know where you’re going? If you’re responding to this paradox with a flutter of impatience, your brain may want—no, require—a good deal more space to wander. Put aside all thoughts of plots and schedules and pursue a “side quest” (bake every last cookie recipe out of your grandma’s kitchen file? build a sculpture with materials recovered from the county dump?), or read for pleasure (I suggest The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber), or write a dirty limerick and text it to everyone in your contacts likely to reply with the laugh-cry emoji. (Or a skull, if you’re a zoomer.) Do something you’ve never done before and see what happens.
(Also, I would be a terrible friend if I did not take this opportunity to mention that Heather has a Tarot for Writers course!)
Take a snack break with some proof pudding.
What most chronically blocked writers lack is the gut faith in themselves that allows these needed intervals of silence to occur.
This is one of the central tenets of the Provisional Confidence course I put out back in 2020: because even if you’re just starting out, you can always look back to some earlier piece of writing and recognize how you have grown in the intervening months or years. (Dig out an essay you wrote as a high-school freshman. If you are a high-school freshman, go back to something you wrote in elementary school.)
Time to explain why I characterized this current round of “block” as 3.5% based in fear: because there have been moments when I’ve thought, Maybe this novel is too ambitious. Maybe I’m not up to the task. Truth is, I wasn’t—and perhaps I’m still not. But the Camille of 2024 or 2025 (or 2030) will be. I know this pinchy spot has a conclusion-point because my experience of those 25+ years promises as much. I am always learning, and therefore I am usually improving. And when all else fails, I remember that nothing lasts.
Take solace in your creative friendships.
The most effective method of self validation is to surround yourself with people who are consistently loving and encouraging—especially when love is candor, like the time Aravinda handed back the first two chapters of my practice novel saying “This is good, and you can do better.” Heather and Erin and McCormick and Henry and Chantal and Deirdre and Seanan have all given me pep talks over the past year. They’ve shared their ups and downs with me too. As my friend Joelle laughed on a catch-up call a few months back: “If you’ve got ‘writer’s block,’ then there’s hope for us all!”
Back when I was still only thinking about writing this time-travel screwball comedy—fall 2015—Joelle invited me to prepare something for a multimedia science-fiction event she and her partner Jim were hosting at a local brewery. Losing my nerve, I said, “Is it all right if I just read from Mary Modern?”
Her response was exactly what I needed to hear: “Nah, I’d rather you read from the time-travel story you were telling me about.” She lovingly pushed me into drafting the first six or seven (very rough) pages, which were warmly received at the reading. It’s these moments I can circle back to whenever I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do this.
Circle back to craft basics and en-JOY reinforcing that foundation.
I have several author friends who teach at the university level, and I greatly admire their ability to extemporize on craft. When I chose a not-so-competitive school for my master’s program, I retained the bandwidth for researching and drafting Mary Modern inside of a school year, but completing that manuscript came at the cost of academic rigor. Looking back, I see how frequently I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants, making decisions without thinking too much about the underlying why. And because I still want to teach on a regular basis someday, I must be able to analyze and chart out my initially-subliminal reasoning for the benefit of my students.
So I decided this pinchy interval was the perfect opportunity to build a sturdier knowledge-base. I’ve spent the past year listening to the excellent (and admirably concise!) Writing Excuses podcast, and I am grateful beyond measure to Heather for recommending A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (a.k.a. Uncle George). I’ve revisited Gail Carriger’s wonderful guide to the Heroine’s Journey, and I have read other craft books by Ursula K. Le Guin and John Gardner and Samuel Delany. I also can’t say enough good things about Stuart Horwitz’s Book Architecture method.
Notice how your needs and priorities are shifting, and make whatever adjustments are appropriate.
You determine your limits by testing them gently but repeatedly, then respecting them—no matter how unlike anybody else’s they are.
The three-plus years I was a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston (late 2013 to mid-2017) were far and away the most productive of my career. Then I moved to Providence, and I got a lot done at the Athenaeum too. I miss both those spaces, and the lovely people I met in each one.
I moved to D.C. in September 2020, and between COVID and living solo for the first time, it never occurred to me to write outside my home. Between late 2020 and mid-2022, I wrote more than 360 pages of the time travel novel. Sounds like I was productive, right?
…HOWEVER.
I live on the ground floor of a very small apartment building. I like to write in the front room—where almost all the houseplants live, since it’s the only sunny room in the place—and I like to keep the blinds up and the windows open as long as it’s warm enough. I like where I live and I enjoy working at home, but sometimes there are interruptions: my across-the-hall neighbor getting locked out, my landlady wanting to talk about maintenance work, the next-door neighbor blasting the radio, a substitute mail carrier asking to be let in, some random canvasser trying to get my attention through the window. They don’t occur every day, but it has happened frequently enough that I realized part of my brain’s been holding back from the work out of an ultimately-futile sense of vigilance. Working in a more private location in the apartment doesn’t relieve the anxiety. I have tried working at the library, but the fear of interruption persists.
So I finally realized I needed a space like the WROB, and joined the D.C. Writers Room in Tenleytown. The office is clean and well organized, and monthly dues are very reasonable given that it is run as a business rather than a co-operative. The DCWR doesn’t have the lived-in, absentminded-professor vibe or community spirit of the WROB, but that’s not what I need, is it? I’ve been reveling in the delicious sense of purpose I feel as I settle into my desk-for-the-day with my notes and a hot cup of tea.
I’m kind of embarrassed that it took me so many months to see that I needed a dedicated writing-space outside the house. That said:
It isn’t a problem if what worked before isn’t working anymore—it’s an invitation to observe and experiment in order to find out what works best for you NOW.
[P]atience, patience in all things, is the most valuable quality a writer can have.
A writer’s working style is idiosyncratic (which is why, as Victoria Nelson points out, emulating the routines of famous authors doesn’t often yield the results we’re hoping for). Process and practices evolve with time and experience, and it is part of the writer’s job to monitor these changes and tweak her approach accordingly. It will take time to monitor these observations, and more time to implement the tweaks. As I laughed to my therapist: “It feels like I’m ‘rebuilding my search indexes.’” [That message appears when I launch Scrivener.]
I recommend Victoria Nelson’s book for every writer (Abebooks link here), but especially those who, like me, find a great deal of (surprisingly practical) insight in Jungian psychology. I love how Nelson’s treatment of conflicting parts of self dovetails with the Internal Family Systems model (which is how I found my current therapist; if you’re not yet familiar, I like Alanis Morissette’s podcast interview with Dick Schwartz for an introduction.) I wish I had found this book before writing Life Without Envy, because the second-to-last chapter on success is as wise as the rest of the book. (Quick side note: I am super excited to use a Solid State gift card from my friend Jason to purchase Nelson’s book The Secret Life of Puppets, because if I appreciate a living author’s work, I buy it new whenever possible. Gotta represent!)
I still don’t believe in writer’s block, which might sound ludicrous given that I have just written or transcribed roughly 4,000 words on the subject. What I do believe in is the reality of whatever is causing the appearance of block. In my case, it’s mostly been a matter of needing more time to teach myself how to write this novel, of reinforcing a sense of trust that I will know how to write it someday. Victoria Nelson calls this particular variety “the silence of incubation.” The pre-birth metaphor feels especially apt by contrast, because a novel is not a baby. It is nonsense to say, “I’ve been working on this for nine months [or however long you’ve got it in your head a novel “should” take to write], therefore it should be DONE!” If this particular incubation period has lasted longer than fifteen years, well…no sense repeatedly banging my forehead against the brick wall of reality.
Speaking of brick walls: when I wrote, “I can catch myself whenever I’m on the verge of trying too hard,” did you wonder about that? I did too. I know it must look like I’ve been trying too hard with this novel. To clarify, it’s the difference between the overwhelming joy I feel when I am connecting to my characters and the trying to convince myself I feel that joy. If this weren’t a full-body YES!-YES!-YES! type of project even on those blindfolded-in-a-bog-of-molasses days, I’d have (rightfully) given up on it long ago.
As writers we do not want to accept that our life in art is not, and will never be, a steady linear progression into the sunlight—that it is actually a series of advances and retreats, stops and starts, unfoldings and closings up.
So that’s my situation. The underlying reason(s) for your (apparent) block could be something else. You’ve heard this before, no doubt, but the way through it necessitates a mixture of gentleness and curiosity, a complete and unconditional acceptance of the present situation (which is what you are ideally doing in any given moment anyway). SURRENDER ANYTHING TO DO WITH A TIMELINE (I’m so sorry, but this applies especially if you are under contract), and devise a simple yet specific list of self-supportive practices and helpful thoughts to think whenever you catch yourself engaging in self recrimination. (Since this post turned out much longer than planned, I’ll save my sample list for next time.) And for goodness’ sake, just put it away for awhile and work on something light, something that feels easy, something you can play with.
