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Key points
- Writer's block is real.
- Writer's block may be of a common type—fear of failure, of rejection—but the exact explanation is specific to each of us and our psychology.
- One way to unlock writer's block is to uncover the psychological source of the anxiety that is producing it.
In fairy tales, Abracadabra has the power to break spells. And what is writer’s block, if not a maniacal spell that roots you to the spot? I was once stuck in such a spot for weeks, until released in an instant—not by that 11-letter charm, but by a 16-word one. It felt exactly like magic. Not only did those few words dissolve the block, but also they unlocked the psychological puzzle of how I had come to be trapped in the first place.
How it began
Paralysis struck as I was attempting to edit the first draft of my memoir, Don’t Say A Word!. For the opening line and title, I had decided to use something my mother had said while carving the Thanksgiving turkey one year. This was the moment I first became aware that my parents had begun the very strange metamorphosis that is the central mystery of the book. My husband, two children, and I were visiting from Boston and were swept up in the excitement of my parents' plan to spend winters in Mexico. But alarm bells went off when my mother announced their decision to buy a used car, sight-unseen in Guadalajara from a lawyer they had good reason to think dishonest. Gleefully unfazed, she prefaced the news with a pre-emptive warning, “Don’t say a word!”
Opening my book with my mother’s command seemed perfect. As a child, I’d felt squelched by my parents, a domineering pair who had intimidated me into never asserting myself with them, a condition I did not outgrow. I loved the notion of flying in the face of my mother’s order by writing a hundred thousand words or so that she would have cut off from the start. Do I need to mention that both my parents had died before I began my writing project?
The rough draft had emerged in a sort of cathartic rush, but when I tried to edit what I'd written so that my parents and I came through as real people with our relationship delineated, I couldn’t do it. After my mother’s opening warning, I couldn’t find a following sequence that flowed or even seemed to make sense. Every day, I would cut a few lines or a paragraph from one place and paste them somewhere else, but by the end of the day I’d have returned everything to where it had been. The writing felt heavy, dug in. In fact, the words on the computer screen seemed written in stone: they actually had a carved, incised look to them. To return each morning to my computer was to re-enter a world of complete stasis.
How it ended
This inertia persisted for weeks, until the day I was inspired to make a small insertion into the forth paragraph, on Page 2. The first paragraph set up the Thanksgiving announcement scene; the second described my mother's plan; the third introduced my parents. The forth drew the following quick portrait of our relationship:
“And why the gag order? I never challenge them, at least not directly. A lifetime of bowing to my parents’ impressive self-confidence and extremely impressive tempers had worn a deep groove. I was as likely to confront them as to throw myself under a steamroller, and for the same reason.”
But that morning, seemingly from the blue, it suddenly occurred to me to follow the insistence that I never challenged them with this parenthetical remark:
“(And I’m a person who in all other situations needs to get in her two cents.)”
As I typed the words into the text, I watched as my computer screen turned soft and pliable. It took on a luminous, jiggly look. Cutting and pasting no longer required brute force. More importantly, the sentences became readable as strings of words, as opposed to proclamations with an authority I couldn’t question.
It was as though my mother’s booming, “Don’t say a word!”, carried the weight of her formidable personality. My mother had seemed to loom over my writing as she had over the dining table, silencing me. But as soon as I inserted the little mention of my usual assertiveness, reminding myself and informing the imagined reader that in other contexts I could speak up perfectly well, I could.
The decisive battle that broke the spell was fought entirely in my head. Playing the part of my mother was the frightening version of her I’d created as a child and had never outgrown. In my effort to recreate the Thanksgiving scene on paper, I’d inadvertently called her up, like an unfriendly ghost, to sit beside me at my computer. Playing the part of me in that scene on the page was the childhood version of me that I always reverted to in her presence, the one who had yet to break free. But the ‘I’ that inserted the parenthetical words was the one that was writing the book, the one who’d been happily living as an adult in the real world. Magically, marvelously, the mere parenthetical insertion of the writer-I into the dining scene was sufficient to banish the ghost and to give me back control.
What a pity that ‘I’ never had the guts to grapple with her demon-mother in real life: it might have produced some really big magic.
