Is Writer's Block Real?

The Pleasure of the Text

Writer's Block has plagued aspiring writers since the dawn of time. In this episode, Shannen and Gareth discuss whether Writer's Block is real, how to avoid it, and provide techniques to help you write, whether or not you are inspired.

Show Notes:

Authors discussed, their works, and sidenotes.

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people” - Thomas Mann.

Graham Green

English writer and journalist, the late Graham Greene (1904-1991), was regarded as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. Strangely enough, he developed a reputation as both a ‘serious writer’, working on Catholic novels, and what he called ‘entertainers’ or thrillers. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966 and 1967; however, in 1966, Nelly Sachs and Shmuel Yosef Agnon co-won, and in 1967, Miguel Ángel Asturias won the final title. He was recruited into MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6, or SIS), the foreign intelligence service of the UK, by his sister Elisabeth in 1941, where he met and befriended Kim Philby, a secret Soviet Agent; Greene later wrote the introduction to Philby’s 1968 memoir, My Silent War.

• Brighton Rock
• The End of the Affair
• The Quiet American
• The Heart of the Matter
• The Power and the Glory
• The Third Man and Other Stories
• Stamboul Train (Orient Express)
• Travels with my Aunt
• The Ministry of Fear
• Our Man in Havana
• Graham Greene: Complete Short Stories

Wikipedia

Ah, Wikipedia, where would we be without you? I challenge any curious individual to make the claim (absurd though it may be) that they have not, at anytime in their life, used the wonderful resource that is Wikipedia. Want to know what catabolism is? Wiki it! Want to know what Cacophony is? You get the picture. Quoted from the Wikimedia Foundation’s own website, “your generous donations help us maintain our independence, serve our diverse and global community, and––unlike many other major websites––guarantee that Wikipedia will never have to rely on advertising. In short, your donations help keep free knowledge free.”

Alice W. Flaherty

Author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Alice Flaherty has many titles; neurologist, researcher, physician and educator, and her interests included the neural basis of creativity. In her work, she argues that specific areas of the brain function for literary creativity, and that blocks (writer’s block) resulted from disrupted brain activity in those areas.

• The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

Free Writing

Monday or Tuesday, published in 1921 by the Hogarth Press, is the only collection of short stories published in Virginia Woolf’s lifetime. The collection includes a short story titled ‘Monday or Tuesday’, but the phrase crops up earlier in 1919 in Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

[1] See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 376, citing a letter from Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth, 16 Oct 1930.

Virginia Woolf

The late Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is considered one of the most important 20th-century modernist authors, and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness (free writing) as a narrative device. Strange for the times, she was encouraged by her father to start writing professionally in 1900. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an artistic and literary group comprising herself, her brothers and their intellectual friends. In 1917 Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work.

• Mrs Dalloway
• To the Lighthouse
• A Room of One’s Own
• The Waves
• Orlando
• The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf

Writing in Cafes

Have you always thought there is more to writing in a café besides coffee and cake? Well, you may be right. Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition can be read here.

The OuLiPo Group

The OuLiPo group, founded in 1960, believed in the use of literary constraints to inspire creativity. The writer most famously associated with OuLiPo was Georges Perec (1936-1982).

- Perec wrote a 300-page mystery novel without using the letter 'e' (La Disparition [1979, A Void]). This is known as a lipogram (i.e. a written work in which a particular letter or group of letters is intentionally omitted).

- He also wrote a short story with 'e' as its only vowel ('Les Reventes' [1972, 'The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex')].

Rather than inhibiting him, Perec claimed that such constraints freed and inspired him to the extent that ‘many of his texts almost wrote themselves.’

• Oulipo Compendium by Alastair Brotchie

Georges Perec

Perec (1936-1982) is a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, essayist, and is a member of the OuLiPo group. Oulipo Group, you ask? Oulipo is short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature", or an even better description was coined by Raymond Queneau, Oulipo’s founder, who described Oulipians as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." Oulipo was a group of French writers and mathematicians who sought to use constrained techniques to enhance their creative endeavours. Georges Perec was a notable member, as well as Italo Calvino. Perec wrote the novel La disparition, which did not contain the letter ‘e’ (which is an incredibly common letter in the French language). Just as impressive as Perec’s feat, this novel has been translated into multiple languages, also excluding common letters. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void, which omitted the use of ‘e’, the Spanish version excludes ‘a’, whilst the Russian version excludes ‘o’.

• Life: A User’s Manual
• Things: A Story of the Sixties with a Man Asleep
• Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
• W or the Memory of Childhood
• A Void
• I Remember
• An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
• Brief Not...