Burdened by the writer's block

Bindu Menon

JK Rowling, creator of the ‘Harry Potter’ series, is known to share her thoughts on writing very often. A few years ago, during an interaction with her readers on Twitter, she said, “The wonderful thing about writing is that there is always a blank page waiting. The terrifying thing about writing is that there is always a blank page waiting.”

This may seem a tad too modest coming from a writer with a voluminous literary output. Rowling has to her credit nearly 30 books, much of it rooted in the Potterverse. A decade back, she took a break from the wizarding world and fantastic beasts and turned to writing crime fiction. She has, so far, penned seven novels in the detective ‘Cormoran Strike’ series, all under a new pseudonym, Robert Galbraith.

Therefore, the heart of the matter is that even a prodigiously prolific writer like Rowling can be daunted by a blank page on certain days. Or what we simply call writer’s block. The condition needn’t only afflict writers; it can affect journalists, lawyers, academics, researchers, students and anyone who has to write a great deal. The term was first coined by psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler in the 1940s while studying writers burdened by a “neurotic inhibition of productivity”.

So, is writing a slow, tortuous and lonely path to take? Is the process so demanding that writers suddenly experience a creatively numbing blackout? Do they feel like there are no more stories to tell or nothing worth telling? Like it happened with Joseph Mitchell, who was regarded as one of the greatest non-fiction writers for ‘The New Yorker’. He was known as the voice of New York, having penned several intimate portraits of the city and its people for the magazine. His features even inspired writers like Truman Capote and Hunter S Thompson. And then, he could write no further. For the next 30 years, he would sit behind his desk at the magazine’s office but could never type out a single word.

What drives this affliction remains a subject of interest. While Bergler, a follower of Sigmund Freud, blamed writer’s block on oral masochism, deprivation of breast milk and a troubled love life, much of that remains an area of contestation. Whether it be a lack of motivation, the burden of too many distractions that surround a writer’s life, the exasperating quest for perfection or the looming pressure from readers and publishers, the fact is writers have their good days, and most certainly, their bad phases.

Mark Twain, who himself grappled with writer’s block, believed that there are some books that “refuse to be written”.

“They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself,” he said.

There are, of course, master storytellers who have never experienced it. Haruki Murakami, for instance, says he has never encountered writer’s block. In his book ‘Novelist as a Vocation’, Murakami wrote, “I never write unless I really want to, unless the desire to write is overwhelming. When I feel that desire, I sit down and set to work. When I don’t feel it, I usually turn to translating from English.” Perhaps, compartmentalising his work has helped Murakami. When not in the mood to write, he does essays or translations because they are more “technical”. And then, of course, he doesn’t make promises to write, so there are no deadlines, which makes his life happier.

Some authors learn to circumvent the hurdles even before they begin to narrate the story. Toni Morrison, who lent a soulful vitality to African-American literature, once said while she always started a novel, it was never her beginning. Hinting at the intricate problems of writing, she said, “Sometimes, I have to write the beginning after the book is done. Well, that seems like a natural thing, but many people don’t go forward because the beginning isn’t right; they just leave it until they get it right. I write what’s there, what I know is there.”

Talking of beginnings, or rather happy beginnings, Jon Fosse’s decision to write plays never happened out of his own volition. The Norwegian writer, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, was an established novelist and was never really inclined to write a play. But he was broke and when a theatre director, quite convinced of Fosse’s ability as a playwright, offered a good remuneration, Fosse yielded. In 1994, when he embarked on his first play, ‘Someone is Going to Come’, Fosse found he couldn’t stop writing. It was, in his words, the “greatest revelation in his writing career”. Fosse went on to write 40 plays. Sometimes, writers only need a good, sound reason to write.

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