Letter to a blocked writer

After a weekend off, I’m back. Today I decided that my commitment for February and March is this: I’m going to write five days a week, and publish twice a week. Nick said that still seems quite rigorous; I agree that it is, but I think right now that it’s necessary. I hope you’ll continue to join me as I keep writing my way out of being a blocked creative. I need to write. (I also need to stretch. But I really, really need to write.)

Below is what I wrote on January 5th or 6th, when I made the decision to re-commit to my writing. I really like this piece. I hope you do, too. I wanted to wait until I was unblocked to publish this. I don’t really know why. Here goes.

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A letter to a blocked writer

Are you a writer who doesn’t write? A painter who doesn’t paint? A dancer who doesn’t dance? A creative who doesn’t create? If so, these words are for you. If the words ‘writing’, ‘writer’ or ‘write' don’t resonate, substitute them for words that do.

When you’re a blocked writer, you know that it is fucking hard to write.

You also know this when you’re not a blocked writer, but for all sorts of reasons, you keep on showing up to the page and bashing out the words. I’ve lived some of my 36 years like this. It’s frustrating and fulfilling. There is a rush of cortisol and adrenaline when you put your work into the world, and a myriad tiny disappointments when it doesn’t do what you wanted and hoped it would. There’s the wanting more, the checking of stats, and the warm rush of realising that this thing you crafted and created has reached another person somewhere else in the world. Being a writer who writes is rarely as glamorous as you imagine it should be, but there is a feeling inside you, quiet yet steady, that comes when you know that you’re doing it.

And then there is living in this other way – as a blocked writer, as an artist who doesn’t make art. It is of course possible to oscillate between the two, but make no mistake: being a blocked artist is painful and hard.

There is a lot of work in the world that rightly de-romanticises and deconstructs writer’s block. These books, articles, videos and blog posts are often quite harsh. They remind us bluntly that there’s nothing sexy or attractive about failing to put your work into the world. If it takes courage for you to press publish, they remind us, then it took courage for every single writer around the world to publish their work too. A lot of the stuff I have read has a “pull your socks up” tone to it. Undoubtedly helpful in many circumstances, yet perhaps not what you need to hear right now. I’m here to attempt to speak to the dilemma in a way that I haven’t heard it spoken to before – in the way that I need to have the dilemma (and the urgency of trying to write when you haven’t been) spoken about.

A famous Hemingway quote says that writing is simple: you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed. This quote makes writers chuckle. We know that he is at once exaggerating and telling the stark, unembellished truth. To write something real, something truthful, something meaningful, we can’t just bash our fingers across a keyboard. Natalie Goldberg gives us permission to write “the worst junk in America,” which is liberating (even if you live in the UK, like me), but good writing is a craft and maybe even a mild form of exorcism. Anyone can bash out a thousand crappy words, but to write a thousand words that move you, a thousand that move your reader, a thousand words that go somewhere? That takes work.

Writing makes us face ourselves (even when we’re writing about something way ‘out there’ as opposed to the kind of writing that is about ‘in here’). It makes us dredge the depths. Because of that, it is hard. All writers know this, but we writers who don’t write dance perpetually around this, trying to find a way to both avoid writing and convince ourselves that it’s fine we’re not writing when the urgent tug of our inner dialogue keeps pulling us towards that one simple command: write, write, write, write, write. Still, for days, months and – as I found towards the end of the last decade, even years – it is entirely feasible to live your life not writing.

We blocked writers find a million other outlets for our life minutes. We do and make meaningful things happen. We don’t just throw those minutes-not-spent-writing away.  Sure, we do masturbate, we do scroll aimlessly up and down our inboxes, we do eat another biscuit we don’t really want. But we also build and create and commit and connect. We make meaning in other ways – in baking and breaking bread, in dancing – by ourselves, with others, and in the present moment – and in loving and being loved. We build homes and careers. We travel and adventure. We capture and bundle up the minutes of our lives in many other ways.

But we do not write.

We do not write, and on some almost indiscernible level, it slowly kills us. Sure, we like to think that it doesn’t appear to matter. And perhaps it doesn’t, to the outside world. But who we see in the mirror often tells us the ultimate truth.

I often look in the mirror and see sadness, for example. I carry a lot of it. The sadness I see in myself is personal. It is historical and ancestral. Some of it comes from childhood trauma. On and off over the years, I keep chipping away at that. Some of it is ancient and has nothing to do with me. I do constellation work and do my best to chip away at that. Some of it is to do with the enormous pain and sadness of life for so many people in this world. I do what I can about that.

But there’s also a sadness I carry because I know in my bones that I am not living the life that I’m here to live, in this one critical area. I have so many things I want to write, and day after day, I don’t write them. Days pass. Time ticks on. I feel the air constricted in my body when I think about how I’m not writing and I know that, aside from not becoming a mother, it will be, if I let it continue to unfold in this way, one of the few things I will be regretting on my deathbed or even before that, when I am 65 or 70 or 80 and my hands are too arthritic to be able to write.

I know I’m not alone, and that often makes me wonder: if I can live such a full and wonderful life (albeit a sadness-tinged one, as I said earlier), how many other people are also living full, wonderful lives in which they are not writing, or creating, or painting, or music making, or doing the one thing that their conscience – perhaps even their soul – keeps calling them to do?

I wonder what the world would be like if all the blocked creatives and disconnected artists actually did their work? How would the world be changed? What books, paintings, plays, songs, dances, sculptures, raps, poems, street art, monologues, fashion statements and artisan crafts would exist if all the blocked artists showed up to their metaphorical canvas of choice? What projects wouldn’t be completed or tended to because these people were making their art instead? How would the world be changed?

I think it would be incredibly different living in a world full of unblocked creatives. I have a feeling it would be different for better, not for worse. I think of all the bankers who would be painters, all the lawyers who would make music, all the consultants and managers and office executives who would let a billion stories, thus far untold, loose into the world. I think of all the violence and aggressive deals that would be left undone because people were more concerned with getting the light just so on the canvas, or crafting just the right metaphor, or kneading the dough to just the right consistency.

I also think of some of the writers and artists whose work has woven its way into the fabric of my life, and I try to imagine what my one single life would be without their work in it. In a world without Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, would I have found the courage to leave my marriage? In a world without Rob Bell or Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, would I even be writing this? In a world without music, would life be worth living at all? In a life without Harry Potter, surely the world would be a far less magical place.

JK Rowling’s example is important, because it speaks to the second part of the writing conundrum: actually putting your writing out into the world, and in many cases, trying to garner support for it from a publisher. In a best case scenario, that happens – and then what? Then you’ve got to face the critics. Here, imagine a world without Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the arena’ speech, or a world in which Brené Brown keeps her shame research findings cloistered within the walls of academia.

On every part of the writer’s path, there are hazards. There’s the writing, the editing, the sharing, the processing of feedback, the publishing, the hustling, the critiques and criticism, the possibility of your work bombing, the demands, the endless arrogant internet commentaries, the hate mail, the internal shame, the hunger for more, the hope of going viral, the sick feeling of realising you are, the terror of realising something you wrote is far, far beyond your control now, the fierceness of the competition, the overwhelm of the scale of the noise we’re immersed in, the recognition that you’ve become yesterday’s news but still bear open wounds from being the target of so many people’s vitriol and hatred, the unfairness of some truly awful shite getting far more press and praise than they would in a just world. Yes, I am speaking from some experience here when I reference all of the above. And yes, I finally realise that I am not alone.

The twists and turns go on and on, and the mistake, I am learning the hard way, is to expect things to be any different. If it’s like this for you, it’s like this for everyone. A few years ago, I allowed one of the unavoidable aspects of the writer’s path – criticism bordering on hate – to knock me on such a deep level that I essentially stoppered up my mouth and taped up my fingers. If I’m going to be criticised, I bargained with the universe, then I’m not going to write at all. And so I haven’t. Not for myself anyway. I’ve made a half-decent job of ghost writing for a bunch of other people (including this piece, which got over 100,000 reads), but I haven’t even allowed myself to daydream about writing again until recently.

Now, it’s over five years later (maybe more!) and everything about my life is different. It’s time for me to show up once again to the page and to put my words and work out into the world.

I love words, yet there are some that I dread people calling my writing: words like pompous, over-indulgent, boring and unnecessary, for starters. Here though, I guess acceptance is the key. A lesson I genuinely didn’t learn as a kid was that every single person on this planet (and there are a LOT of us!) is an individual, and what one person thinks is not the gospel truth. There is no such thing as the gospel truth, in fact. Nobody is the authority on what anything means. I have loved books and films that other people couldn’t stand, and vice versa. Who is right? Whose opinion matters more? Ultimately, it’s down to us to develop boundaries and ways of interacting with the people who encounter our work that work for us.

I am not a trained writer. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I do know that when I was a little girl, there were three things I wanted to be: a teacher, an actress and a writer. One I have been; a second, I have toyed with as an amateur and I know is not for me; and the third is the sister life that keeps on calling my name.

I cannot explain why the time has come for me to stop fucking around. I only know that today, it’s here. And I intend to show up and be fucking brave.

So how about you? What is the life, the activity, the calling that keeps on tugging at your consciousness, your conscience and your heart? Are you up for the ride by saying yes to it?

I hope so. Because as I said earlier, I keep on imagining. I imagine what it would be like if we all said yes to our purposes, to the projects and ways of living and being that keep on relentlessly calling our name. Just imagine.

(Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash. Thank you, Steve.)