THE DOWN AND DIRTY WAY TO CONQUER WRITERS BLOCK

I’m not a prolific writer. In fact, I’m rather slow. It’s a bit difficult to dash off five or seven thousand words a day when you write historical fiction. Worse, sometimes I encounter writers block – but I know how to conquer that.

“People don’t want to write, they only want to have written,” Dorothy Parker famously remarked. Most of us writers, at one time or another, have subscribed to that sentiment, particularly in those dry periods when we find it almost impossible to come up with anything solid to write about.

What goes on in these fallow periods? Why doesn’t the creativity we know is there flow like the headwaters of the Amazon?

Over the years writers have asked me this question in my psychotherapy practice, and I’ve certainly thought about it in my own fiction writing.

Somerset Maugham had a unique approach to writers block that I’ve incorporated in my own work, and my work with clients. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Maugham faced a blank page on his typewriter and pecked away his name: ‘I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham . . .’ – until something came to him. His extraordinary Freudian-laced short story ‘Rain’ came to him in just such a way.

Okay, okay, I’m getting to it. What was Maugham really doing? Well, the trick was just sitting down at the typewriter. So when clients ask me how they can overcome their own writers block, I say 'sit down at the computer and write just two sentences. Just two.' It turns out it’s like that potato chip advert, ‘bet you can’t eat just one.’ In this case two.

Really it’s a matter of overcoming inertia. If you do sit down at the computer, once you start writing, it’s a bit difficult to actually stop at just two sentences. The trick to fooling the unconscious is to sit at the computer and begin, any beginning really.

It’s a rather simple ploy, but it works! I wrote a complete first draft of The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich by using this method. Two sentences became twenty, and then two hundred and then – hey, almost a complete draft.You might want to give it a try.

Take heart, it could be worse. James Baldwin called the place he wrote in Paris (in Paris, yet!) the torture chamber – but that’s another story.
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