Writer’s Block

Productive writing is not constant, and it is writing well that most writers consider important, a worthwhile use of time and energy. Consequently, the term writer’s block has become a catch-all phrase thrown out to avoid sitting down in front of a keyboard or taking pen in hand because nothing we write seems worth writing. The problem may not be one of laziness, lack of ideas, external distraction, or any of the common reasons conjured up. Rather, we may be afraid of our shadow. If what Richard Hugo says is true – “writers write to reject themselves” – then rejection of self is the engine that drives our unconscious forward, which pushes images leaping from one fragmented thought to another into our conscious mind that, in turn, creates a theme. Suddenly, we find our writing has become inspired.

Every human has a shadow self, part of us we don’t like. The Shadow is any part of ourselves we reject and therefore, do not allow expression in our lives. For writers, that part of us hidden away is often depicted in stories. To write true, to write well, we must chase the Shadow or face what we reject. When I is met, we are overwhelmed with energy, possibilities, and unimaginable images. As Prospero said of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I acknowledge to be mine.”  Think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein’s monster, or Dorian Gray. One could argue that Bret Ellis is chasing his own shadow in American Psycho. What holds true for fiction becomes more intense in autobiographical poetry and memoir writing. 

 Once we struggle through that rejection—often a traumatic ordeal—and begin to accept what and who we are, the forward motion of our writing dissipates. There is no further incentive to cause ourselves more pain. The discovery has been made. We are not “blocked” from ideas, but our will to discover has been substantially weakened. Thus, to reignite this energy source another rejection of self must be faced. How often can this be done? How much of the self can be cannibalized for the sake of art? I would surmise that each writer has individual and unique limitations, or tolerance for pain, in that regard. It isn’t a pretty picture, but it is a sacrifice that must be made. With that in mind, I can think of no other psychological tool more helpful to us all than resolve, a personality trait synonymous with words like determination, tenacity, and doggedness, words spoken far more easily than acted upon. Part of the reason for this difficulty lies in the fact that what’s being done only leads to a need to do more. The process becomes the goal and the goal’s only reward is more work. A brilliant writer and good friend once told me, “Your goal is to publish a book because you think it will change your life. Then, you publish a book and discover your life is the same as it was before, only now you need to write another book.” She was right.

To avoid being completely overwhelmed by this reality, I try and remember a man named Mike from my hometown of Princeton, Indiana. We weren’t friends. In fact, Mike happened to be several years my senior. In high school, he hung with a crowd we referred to as “gearheads” because they specialized in cruising the town all night every night from Dick Clark’s Drive-Inn at the north end down Main Street to Winkler’s Carhop Shake Shoppe at the south end in their souped-up, chopped and blocked, bored and stroked Ford roadsters and Chevy Belairs. 

These cars could all “shit and git,” meaning they could leave a dead stop with a whine of engine and squeal of tires like a normal family sedan was never built to do. Mike drove a 1956 Chevy. The car had a stock 327 cubic inch V-8 but boasted a Holley four-barrel carburetor and a four speed Borg & Warner transmission with a Hurst floor shifter. The shifter had a screw on eight-ball for a shifter knob and Mike could wind the car up so high in the first three gears, you’d believe a jet airplane was taxiing on Main Street. He’d pop the clutch and run through the shift pattern leaving four patches of rubber, one for each gear. The feat remains unrivaled in my hometown and Mike did it frequently with ease. Most of the gearheads garnered several speeding tickets before graduation, and he led the list.

Girls always waved with uneasy glee as Mike laid rubber leaving one of the drive-in fast food joints, pouring his cherry-red Chevy into the dark hole of night between the faded yellow street lamps on Main. The throaty growl of his dual, cutout exhaust baffles left the young women twitching and giggling. It was a good thing, too, because he was a homely boy—sandy-haired, buck-toothed, bent-backed, pasty-faced, and pimpled—who needed to always be moving away for the purpose of remaining cool.

For several hours each week before and after school, rain or shine, you could find him in the Palace Pool Room shoving dimes into the pinball machine. His eyes, which were too big for his face and earned him the nickname “bugeyes,” stayed glued to the huge ball bearings as they bounced and rolled off rails and pegs before settling in one numbered hole or another. His head swiveled and gibbeted like he was a bobble head doll as lights flashed, bells rang, numbered screens changed, and Mike sought desperately through body hunches and grinds to create a winning pattern before the machine tilted and shut off. His reasoning was sound. The Palace allowed players to cash in free games they had won and like most of us, Mike deluded himself into believing that a predetermined electronic outcome would come out in his favor if he only put a few more dimes in the slot. On Saturday, he worked all day at the auto parts store to pay for gasoline and his gambling habit. 

Once the sun went down on any given day, the circling of Main Street began and continued till the drive-in’s had closed and every carhop had counted her tips and left for a hot make-out session with her boyfriend on Seed Tick Road. Then, and only then, Mike disappeared in a fog of blue exhaust alone. I speculated he always went home, said good night to his parents who may have spent hours waiting anxiously by the phone for the state police to call and inform them of a fiery James Dean type crash that had taken away their only child. Maybe Mike proceeded to his room and, lying in his piss-stained underwear, watched the end of the Jack Parr Show on a small black & white TV. Like the pattern of his travels, this was the circle of his life. The promise of the next day’s rumble from the Chevy’s unmuffled exhaust pipes was enough to nourish and protect him from the spirit-numbing boredom of his mediocre life.

At this juncture of his young adulthood, Mike seemed destined for nothingness. He continued his banal behavior after high school, working a minimum wage job at the same auto parts store that fed his pinball obsession in high school and cruising all night. Somewhere in his late twenties everything changed forever, as if some god and fired a lightning bolt directly into Mike’s brain. Roll of dimes in hand, he was walking toward his car to begin his pre-work ritual at the Palace Poolroom when a sudden dread overwhelmed his usually blank mind. Something indescribable but terrible seemed to be running at him from behind and gaining on him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw only his mother through the kitchen window washing the breakfast dishes and considering his departure with sad eyes. Mike turned and walked a few steps toward her face. She sensed a problem and rushed out the back door into the driveway of the family home on the corner of Hart and West Streets.

“Mikey, Mikey, you look so pale,” she said.

“Fasdion dreams of although not,” Mike answered.

“What? What are you saying?”

“Bilado feasame atook insteadus.”

“Mikey, you’re scaring me.”

At this point, his wrist went limp like a drag queen’s in conversation. His left arm curled beneath his shoulder and the left side of Mike’s face fell away from his skull as if it were melted modeling clay. Before his thirtieth birthday, gearhead Mike suffered a massive stroke. 

No one, doctors included, understood what precipitated this catastrophe only that it happened and was tragic. This could have been the end of my story. Given Mike’s inability to engage life when he was healthy, it seemed likely that, as a cripple, he might retreat to his room and remain there, spoon-fed and coddled by his mother till the day she died. At which point, he would be transferred to a nursing home there to reside among the addled and forgotten until his last breath was surrendered to the god of grease and motor oil who had apparently forsaken him in this life. But this is a story about how books get written, how it works for a writer, how it allows her to face a shadow and focus it into an emotional reality of two or three or four hundred pages of coherent narrative, and the resolve it takes to start over and do it again. We have our story, all of us have the shadows that create stories locked away in us. What does it take from this point forward to get them out, to fight the fear of discovery that we call writer’s block for want of a better term?

This is the point where I became personally involved in my tale. It was 1973. I had recently returned to southern Indiana after having spent the past three years in New York as a burned-out, used-up, Vietnam vet coming down off a mean speed addiction, angry, full of self-loathing and covered over in a fog of self-pity. I barely remembered Mike, if at all, except for the fact that he was considered a medical freak because of his condition at such an early age. 

On a bright Sunday morning while the good people of Princeton, Indiana, prayed for forgiveness to their various denominations of God and sang hymns of thanks to his Son, a stranger walked by the house. No. Walk is not the right term. Although not much older than his early thirties by appearance, the fellow had almost certainly suffered a bad stroke. His left arm curled like a burnt matchstick till his hand rested in a shriveled ball beneath his armpit. His right hand clutched the side of a shopping cart. He scooted the cart along slowly and leaned into it for support. Throwing his right leg out, he dragged the left one up even with it. Throwing it out again, he repeated the motion and pulled the cart up even with both legs.

This was how the man navigated his way along the sidewalk, each step an arduous journey and the forward motion barely discernible. It would have been normal to feel pity for him, but as our eyes met the determination on his face told me he wanted no sympathy and to receive it would cause great offense. Also, inside the twisted, permanent grimace on his face, I recognized Mike.

“Beautiful day,” he said, the words slurred as if he had been drinking heavily, which I was sure he hadn’t.

“Yes, it is. I guess I should be in church.”

“We all should probably be somewhere we’re not. But, we never see enough of life to know where that is till we’re way past it.” He tightened his mouth against the slow words and moved toward the intersection crosswalk. 

It was a display of great, almost superhuman, courage and resolve that matched some of the actions I had seen in Vietnam and outdid many of them because it required the same level of courage to get out of bed each morning as it did to face a firefight once in a lifetime. Each and every minute of each and every day was a struggle for Mike to accomplish consciously and with great dedication the simple task of walking in a straight line to get from point A to point B, or write his narrative. I saw Mike walking almost every day after that, his head erect, his bearing as straight as possible. His stride never improved and his speed never accelerated, but he asked no one for assistance and increased his distances on a regular basis. 

Most of us have never dealt with the kind of ordeal and the suffering it produced that Mike dealt with, but ff we are writers and want to write true and write well we have to face the fact that body and mind are going to reject what we’re doing, that what is being done requires enormous resolve and a willingness to face what we would ordinarily refuse about the self because that is where the truth hides. It also demands that we exercise on a regular basis—read and write even when it’s painful or we’d rather be doing something else. And most of all, the motivation for writing must come from inside, not a desire to be rich or famous or even accepted but a need to understand and communicate what it means to be human.

At this stage then, writer’s block ceases to be an obstacle and becomes a signal, a sign that we have reached what our mind has been rejecting, what we really needed to write when we began the process.