Expressive Frustration

Writer’s block — or, maybe more accurately, a writer’s expressive frustration — has many presenting symptoms and many causes, but it is at root language-related. Versions of creative stasis may afflict those who practice in other fields — painters and composers can find themselves short of ideas or inspiration — but the situation is not quite the same. Certainly we never hear anything comparable affecting statesmen, lawyers, coaches, electricians or pastry chefs. This affliction afflicts self-anointed users of language, writers, and because their medium of choice — or compulsion — happens to be the universal medium of consciousness and communication, it takes on a metaphysical inflection. If language is the distinctive human feature, its single greatest evolutionary feat, then writers are in a most privileged and vulnerable situation. In the movement from ape to apex, the engaged — successful — use of language, literary expression, represents the latter. It follows then that a frustration or failure in its use must be seen as something more sweepingly indicative as well. The fact that any true success is rare and difficult is not consoling to the person who is failing in the attempt.

SVEN BIRKERTS

Most Bad Writers Are Confident

Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.

MARY KARR

Go Straight to It

I give it the first energy of the day. When I get up, I go to my office and start writing. I’m still in my pajamas. I haven’t even brushed my teeth. I just go straight to it. I feel that there’s a little package of creative energy that’s somehow been nourished by sleep and I don’t want to waste that. I’ll work for an hour or two until I feel like I’ve got something going. Then I can get washed and dressed.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

To Hell with Grammar

To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed.

COLUM McCANN   

Becoming a Writer

Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don’t ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

HILARY MANTEL

Stir Up the Emotion

Writers and actors have some creative ground in common, and so when you’re writing a scene and hoping to convey a mood it’s not the worst idea to try to put that mood into your headspace -- feel it, if only a little. I’m not saying you have to kill a kitten or punch your mother to feel something -- I just mean, stir up the memory of certain emotions if not the emotion itself. Same way an actor might think about a sad moment to conjure tears on-camera.

CHUCK WENDIG

Great Writing Always Gets Noticed in Hollywood

I always get in trouble when I say this: I believe there is no great screenplay that hasn’t at least been optioned. I believe there is no great screenplay that doesn’t get the writer into the business. Most screenplays are mediocre or just okay. Really great writing always, always gets noticed in Hollywood. When I hear someone say, “It’s who you know,” or “I couldn’t get it to the right agent,” that is the consolation of failure. When it really works, it might not get made, because you need a Jupiter effect of a perfect director and a perfect actor—but if the writing is great, you always get into the game.

MARK D. ROSENTHAL

Nurture It

What I’ve learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it’s more than enough and sometimes it’s not enough—by that I mean one’s own creativity. If you can truly tap in to the creative process, you know it’s there all the time, and then you probably don’t need saving.

KIM ADDONIZIO

Sensory Detail

Attention to sensory experience can…pack a triple whammy of writing-related pleasure. When we take the time to notice the sights, sounds, and smells that infuse our scene of writing, we deepen our own enjoyment of the writing process. (Yes, that vanilla-scented candle on your writing desk really can boost your mood while you’re writing.) When we write sentences packed with sensory detail, we deepen our own pleasure in the craft. (As soon as that vanilla-scented candle entered this paragraph, I felt a ping of authorial satisfaction.) And when we connect with our readers through vivid sense imagery, we deepen their delight, too. (Even if you hate the smell of vanilla, you can appreciate the care with which I have inserted that candle into this paragraph.)

HELEN SWORD

Be Yourself

Be yourself. Try to matter. Be a good friend. Love freely, even if you are likely--almost guaranteed--to be hurt, betrayed. Do what you were created to do. You'll know what this is, because it is what you keep creeping up to, peering at, dreaming of. Do it. If you don't, you'll be punching clocks and eating time doing precisely what you shouldn't, and you'll become mean and you'll seek to punish any and all who appear the slightest bit happy, the slightest bit comfortable in their own skin, the slightest bit smart. Cruelty is a drug, as well, and it's all around us. Don't imbibe.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS