It isn't that I don't have ideas or things that I want to write about. I just can't seem to articulate anything. It's like knowing you want to build a cabinet, but every time you plunk down a piece of wood on the table saw, it comes out ragged or crooked or flies out of the saw with such force is goes through the wall and into the neighbor's house. After a while you get gun-shy and reject every idea. "A novel about an imprisoned cannibal serial killer who helps an FBI agent solve a series of gruesome murders? That's STUPID. Nobody will buy that."
Back in my college days I found calculus a somewhat difficult subject. I still do, and recognize my relative lack of facility with higher math as a kind of character flaw. Sometimes during tests I'd erase my work so many times I'd erode holes through the paper, and afterwards when I stood up a half a pound of overheated eraser crumbs would fall off my lap onto the floor. That's kind of like what having writer's block is like - I produce a lot of eraser crumbs and I backspace over things so many times the phosphors fall off my computer screen, but I never seem to actually write anything.
To an extent, writer's block in an amateur writer is kind of silly. It's like telling someone "My doctor has advised me not to attempt Mount Everest" while you're standing in Iowa. It may be true, but so what? But since I am now by my own definition anyway a published author, it is now a professional handicap, like someone suffering from Tourette's Syndrome trying to make a living as a professional poker player ("Son of a bitch! Three of a kind!") I'm not MUCH of an author - one writing job for an extremely niche magazine - but hey, one has to start somewhere.
Usually I have the opposite problem - namely, writing WAY more than was necessary or wise. I'm sure when I turned in my magazine job, the editors had to take a hedge clipper to it. "We asked for 1500 words and we got this! Hand me the chain saw!" It isn't easy being edited, especially when you tend to run long by nature, but it probably isn't easy being an editor either, asking for 1500 words about the Chinese invasion of Tibet and getting something on the scale of Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. I have to imagine that editors must sometimes clap their hands to their foreheads and sigh "How many bags of M&Ms did he have to eat while he wrote this opus?"
I'm always amused when people tell me how they had to squeeze in the margins and enlarge the font to get their scrawny papers up to five pages. I was always having to move the margins out and use fonts like Flyspeck-3 to get them down to five pages. I wrote a paper for some sociology class once whose mere bibliography was longer than the complete papers of most of the other students. Another time I was placidly typing away at a novel and realized that I was up to 1,150 pages and I still had no idea how to end the thing! I still don't. A long time ago I was writing a novel on my old Commodore 64 and hit the limits of how big the document in the word processor could be. Not one character more would fit. I felt a bit like a chastened Christopher Columbus sailing off the edge of the word crying "Crap! I thought the edge of the world was just a metaphor!" Another time I was writing a paper about the early days of NATO, especially the decision to allow West Germany to rearm, and was suddenly struck by the fact that I was writing a section on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870! Now THAT'S a digression. (One might profitably surmise that writing outlines isn't one of my strengths either. But I'm pretty good at writing outlines. I just suck at sticking to them.)
Normally I have two weaknesses as a writer. The first is that I can be unbelievably prolix. The second is that I have trouble finishing anything. The two are related, but distinct. In a nutshell, I'm bad at writing the way Stephen King advises. That is, to write the dang thing down at least once with no attempt to edit, self-censor, embellish or otherwise meddle. Write it once, finish it, and then put it away for a while to steep. Me, I get halfway through, have a better idea, back up, start over, become disillusioned with the better idea, undo everything and revert to the original, make some more progress, then decide that the better idea was better after all... "No! Circus clowns! That's it! It's all circus clowns and it takes place in... Paraguay! Yes! No! Yes!" It starts out being a horror novel, so why have I written thirty pages on how rock crushers at gravel pits work?
It's so demoralizing.
The result is a hacked-up mass of scar tissue that makes Joseph Conrad seem breezy and concise. And then there's the fact that they never actually end; I just run out of interest or ideas or, sometimes, memory in my computer.
But these days I'm really stuck, and it's frustrating. The best approach is to not worry about it. It's like trying to remember Ethel Merman's name - as soon as you stop trying to remember it, you'll remember it. But it takes longer. To get rid of writer's block, I have to stop writing for a week or two, and that's bad. Writing is (for me, anyway) a bit like taking out the trash: if I don't do it on a fairly regular basis, things kind of pile up and start to smell. So not writing for any length time amounts to dropping a tuna fish sandwich in the kitchen trash can and pretending it isn't there for a week or two, olfactory clues to the contrary.
So that unpleasant smell you're picking up right now? That's just my tuna fish sandwich.
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