ROBERT FULFORD ON WRITER’S BLOCK.

How writers through history have tried to outwit their worst enemy

Edmund Bergler, a New York Freudian analyst, built a reputation in the 1940s by studying one of the heart-rending problems of literature. He called it “neurotic inhibition of productivity.” It’s usually called “writer’s block” but some prefer to say “blank page syndrome.” That third phrase suggests the terror, the inexplicable creepiness, of intending to write something while a totally white screen stares at you in disappointment.

Bergler wondered what caused this familiar complaint. Did writers drain themselves dry, as many speculated? Were they bored with their own ideas?

Bergler treated some writers and wrote a book, The Writer and Psychoanalysis. As he saw it, the problem was in the subconscious. The writer was a masochist, “emotionally addicted to unresolved negative emotion.” He or she was self-punishing for events in the past either forgotten or never understood. That’s a familiar Freudian idea, to which Bergler added, “Man’s inhumanity to man is equalled only by man’s inhumanity to himself.”

Assuming he was right, a blocked writer could sign up for deep analysis. But most writers either disagreed with Bergler or decided not to go down that possibly endless road. They tried instead to outwit the block. Since the block appeared as if by magic, you might trick it into staying away. Pretend you’re writing only a rough draft, rather than a masterpiece, and it could disappear.

After years of creative anti-block strategies, the Internet now fills up with helpful tips, under headings like “Beat Blank Page Syndrome: 10 Tricks.” Change your situation, some old hands suggest. Move somewhere else in the house or to a coffee shop. Shift yourself into another mind set. Remember that many good books have been written in bed.

Close your computer and write on paper. Stop writing and read something totally outside your intended subject. Set short goals. Promise yourself you’ll write for 15 minutes, no more. Avoid obsessing about your immediate frustration.

Graham Greene avoided writer’s block through a piece of luck in his youth. At age 16 he was so unhappy at his school that he ran away. His parents decided he needed psychotherapy and in therapy he learned about keeping a dream journal. In his 50s, he suddenly ran up against what he called a creative “blockage.”

For a brief period he couldn’t think about anything but his failure to get words on paper. Reading his old dream journals was so engrossing that it freed him from his anxiety about writing. Soon he was back at work, churning it out.

My own experience falls into the change-your-channel category. When beginning as a magazine writer, I fell accidentally into the trick of writing articles from inside out or from end to beginning. My assignment was to do a longish piece on a national politician. Having learned as a newspaper reporter to write the opening first, I typed out what seemed to me a decent beginning. Unfortunately, it didn’t lead to anything interesting. I set it aside and wrote another opening, which seemed better but still not good. I wrote a third, with the same result. Soon I had six or seven openings. Taken together, they began to look slightly like an article. And with a lot of editing, manipulation and smoothing, they turned out to be the magazine’s cover story.

That demonstrated that it’s not necessary to write in the final order. Instead, you can begin with any passage that will likely be in the finished piece, even the ending. With that done, you are back in business. This was in the typewriter age, but when I acquired a computer it seemed as if it had been invented just for this method.

Edmund Wilson, pondering the pain of writing, decided that there’s something pathological in authorship. In his influential book, The Wound and the Bow, he suggested that genius and neurosis may be connected. Look at James Joyce, he said. Or Charles Dickens. They were emotionally wounded by their early lives, but those wounds shaped their work – and sometimes their failure to work. In The Crack-Up, Wilson’s posthumous collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s late writing, he outlined reasons for Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and the fading of his power.

The most famous writer’s block was the one that afflicted Joseph Mitchell. A shrewd and sympathetic reporter, he was a star at the New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century. In 1944 his lovingly crafted pieces about the odd denizens of New York were collected in a much-loved book, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon. His career developed as it should have, until it abruptly stopped: he wrote nothing for publication from 1964 until his death 32 years later in 1996.

He never explained what happened. Apparently he never consulted a therapist. He treated his block as something that just happened, like a case of the flu. Year after year, he went in to work in his office at the New Yorker. His colleague Roger Angell wrote, “People who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home.” Calvin Trillin recalled hearing that he was “writing away at a normal pace until some professor called him the greatest living master of the English declarative sentence and stopped him cold.”

Otherwise, he remains a perfect mystery.

DID WRITERS DRAIN THEMSELVES DRY, AS MANY SPECULATED? WERE THEY BORED WITH THEIR OWN IDEAS?

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