- (Read Danish version here.)
It happened a few days ago. I had an inkling that it was coming, but I had ignored all the signs.
At first, I thought that if I just kept going, confronted it, and kept at it, perhaps I could write my way through it. I tried to overcome the problem by deleting everything I had written in the past few days and rewriting it. That was the method Joseph Conrad recommended: facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through it. Face it!
But when I “faced” it and read what I had written, it became clear to me that it wasn’t working: it was lifeless, the words had dried out under my fingers.
Mechanical Breakdown
It’s almost a mechanical thing when you get stuck in your writing. It actually happens in a similar way to when your car runs out of gas. Anyone who has ever run out of gas knows what I’m talking about. There’s a sudden weariness in the engine, all functions seem delayed. You press the accelerator, but the acceleration doesn’t happen, the speed decreases, and a few seconds later it happens: you stop, and you have to push the car to the curb.
The Arrival of the Gray
When you get stuck in your writing, the first symptoms can appear several days beforehand. For me, it usually happens at night; I wake up for no reason and stare into the darkness. I lie there thinking about the book I’m working on. I can clearly see the plot and the characters, everything that has been written so far, but it’s as though everything in the book loses momentum. The characters fade out, the plot hardens. All that remains is a tired and gray, uncertain nothingness. Something that doesn’t feel like you can keep writing on.
The next morning, when I sit at the computer, I still have that sense of grayness in my body. I continue writing, forcing myself to press the keys, but the words and sentences are tasteless, they just fill the paper as if you’re stuffing your mouth with sugarless marshmallows.
The first time this happens, I usually just stop writing for the day – maybe I’m just off that day – and begin editing or work on something sensible, hoping it’s just something temporary. But when I wake up the next night and the next night again, I know something is wrong. I’ve gotten stuck.
The Author’s Little Death
This time, I got stuck in the middle of writing a novel about something that happened to me eleven years ago. The first part of the book, about 40 pages, had gone almost without problems. After writing two research-heavy novels set in the last century, I enjoyed writing about something I didn’t need to research. It was all right there, in my memory. And if I had forgotten details, I could just read my diaries from that time. It was joyful, the moods and events flowed.
But a few nights ago, the night symptoms came, and now I’m stuck. It’s an unpleasant state, a kind of writer’s impotence. The Texan author, William Goyen, went so far as to call it a kind of death:
“This happens to writers when there are dead spells. We die sometimes. And it’s as though we are in a tomb; it’s a death. That’s what we all fear, and that’s why so many of us become alcoholics or suicides or insane – or just no-good philanderers.”
Mutation Errors in the Novel’s Genome
I’ve experienced this a few times by now – not alcoholism, suicide, or madness, and only rarely promiscuous behavior – but getting stuck in a novel. It can have various causes. In the more innocent cases, the blockage simply comes from having too much reality around you. Too much work, exams, arguments, and life stress. It’s something that can pass over.
But often, the problem lies in the writing itself. Maybe it’s just the scene. Maybe it’s the direction the novel has developed. It may have mutated wrongly. A novel is a living organism, and like all life forms, defects can also arise in a novel’s genetic material. It could be minor structural issues. Sometimes it’s enough to delete a few chapters. Other times, it’s necessary to start completely over or, worst of all: give up the novel, put it away with the other never-to-be projects. And it hurts.
The Good in Text Stoppages
But in reality, these stoppages, as uncomfortable as they are, are a benefit to the entire novel process. Usually, the word dry-outs are right, they are the subconscious’s signals that you’re doing something wrong and should intervene, that what you’re writing can and should be made better. That’s perhaps what Heinrich Böll acknowledges when he says:
“I have to start completely over. I am no master. But actually, it’s a good thing – it prevents things from becoming a routine.”
Freeing Life from the Marble Block
I’ve spent the past few days wondering why the words in my writing dried out. I wasn’t sure what it was until I heard an interview with the New York-based comic book author, Henrik Rehr. Rehr made a graphic novel about his own experience of the 9/11 attacks. He said that when he normally created fictions in his comics, it was like building them up with small lumps of clay, gradually controlling it and letting it grow.
But when he had to make a comic about his own life, based on his own memories, it was like having a finished marble block of life, where he had to chip away everything lived that wasn’t necessary for the story.
That was exactly what had stopped me. I had become accustomed to writing something where I build the story from the ground up, gathering and cultivating it. In a novel with events from my own life, it’s different. Here, the marble block of memory already stands. I don’t have to gather and cultivate, I have to learn to remove, to chip away everything unnecessary from the memories. Everything has been deleted. Now, I begin again to free the story with hammer and chisel.
