Artistic Combat

Sometimes, things just go horribly wrong. You're there just working on creating or editing something when without warning, the ideas just stop flowing. You don't know what happened, and right now it's the biggest obstacle in your life since that moment when you were six and the grade school bully was standing between you and your lunch. Or Game Boy. Or the playground.

Regardless of what this bully's blocking, you know you need to reach it as soon as possible while you still have time to do so. You struggle to get past, yet each attempt ends up falling apart as the bully stops you in your pitiful tracks and shoves you back. As you land on your butt for what seems like the umpteenth time, the bully just cackles maniacally at you. You struggle to get back on your feet, determined each time... only to repeat the cycle.

I don't know where I originally found this, but it's obvious that this isn't mine.
However, her focused and intense look at her laptop? That's me, like, half the time I type something up.

Artists (like myself) these days will tell you that while they've come a long way from the schoolyard blues, a different kind of bully comes through and blocks them from their goals. As such, the metaphor changes and adapts to their current wants, needs, and goals - lunch is now that lunch date they promised a friend they'd go out on when (s)he finished working; that Game Boy is his/her social life they've been cast away from due to some kind of self-imposed exile; the playground is the rest of their life that (s)he could be enjoying instead of working on whatever it is they're working on.



So, who's bullying the artist then? Well, to tell you the truth, it's not a commissioner breathing down their necks about the upcoming deadline. It's not a critic who's said nothing but harsh critique after harsh critique.

It's artist's block.

It's a common bully artists have to face, and the reasons for it being so common will vary from person to person. Some get burnt out. Others find themselves intimidated by something and set up a mental wall they can't climb over. Still others just run out of ideas.



Now, there are many ways to fend off this bully, and any artist out there knows that. But for the budding and struggling folks (read: those with low self-esteem about their work quality), they see no way out of their despair. They just stay on the ground, wondering if they should pick themselves up and fall yet again, or sit there until the bell rings and "saves" them.

In my case, I once suffered from major artist's block back in high school. I used to be more of a prolific writer back then - particularly in my upperclassman years. (Admittedly, most of this work wasn't the happiest stuff to read, but that's another story.) It got to the point where I was a writer for both the school newspaper and the school yearbook for my Senior year and also became a copy editor for said newspaper. (This has got to be where I began growing as a Grammar Nazi; I can't find any reliable story in my past that fits otherwise.) I would write a story for one, then write a story for another, and then I'd write a little something for myself. Each time I began a project, though, I would end up succumbing to this metaphorical adversary who was determined to stop me from succeeding.

My high school English teacher at the time would occasionally catch me cursing at myself for being pushed around by this bully. After explaining what was going on inside my mind, he'd lightly smack me upside the head (figuratively and literally), order me to look him in the eye, and tell me to repeat after him:

"There is no such thing as a writer's block."

I believed him - he is a great teacher (one of my favorites from high school) - but like many artists who're told that mantra, I couldn't bring myself to believe it. As such, my grip and mastery of the page began to slip - I began making common mistakes in my work, didn't make it as catchy as it used to be, and let other errors slide past the radar when proofing things.

After multiple instances where we'd go through this almost ritualistic process of head-jarring, eye-looking, and phrase-repeating, he got a little fed up. Mind you, it wasn't with me - I was amongst his most memorable students (if not his favorites). Rather, he was fed up with the fact that my belief in something as mythical as North Dakota was altering and affecting the quality of my work.

So one day during class, I walked up to him ready to whine about my latest writer's block and how I could not fathom writing some story down for the life of me. (This was at a time where I thought artist's block only affected writers.) After telling him about it, he rolled his eyes and I expected him to stand up and go ahead with the "ritual."

Instead, he skipped to the "repeat after me" section and handed me a piece of paper, telling me to read it and not come back up to him until I did.



What follows now is what was on that piece of paper. Obviously, it's not mine (as evidenced by the "NOT MINE" tag you saw up there), but it belongs to one Cherryl Armstrong. Originally published in 1983, this paper-of-sorts has come a long way and has surely helped numerous English teachers and their students. While it is aimed at combating writer's block (a very common derivative of artist's block), it doesn't necessarily mean that this paper is only for us writers - rather, just shift a few words around and change some more so that it applies to your craft as an artist.




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There's No Such Thing as Writer's Block
(Or If There Is, Some Suggestions For Dissolving It)
By Cherryl Armstrong

Only three days after the South Coast Writing Project's Summer Institute had ended, I was across the country, in Massachusetts, about to begin another group of twenty-five at the Cummington Community of the Arts. The situation appeared idyllic: a cabin in which to work, a lively group of writers and artists to get to know, and a whole month ahead during which I could write whatever I chose, with no other obligations to distract me. My send-off from the Writing Project had been exuberant; the Fellows back home would be eager to read the poems I would write, and I was, although exhausted from the intensity of the summer program, filled with Writing Project enthusiasm. As added insurance I had with me a poem by Barry Spacks - part of our ongoing collaboration - and I intended to start by writing my first poem in response to his.

I was unpacked and nearly recovered from jet-lag I sat at my desk looking out the window onto a green Berkshire meadow; the sunlight poured in, and I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. I looked at Barry's poem, than at my blank page. Then I got up and rearranged the bookshelf. I sat down, straightened the desk, thinking about the poem I had decided I should write first. Nothing. And worse than nothing, the fear of there being nothing. It seemed the idyllic conditions conspired to create a monumental writing block. I got up and left the cabin, walked along the road to the mailbox, knowing it was too early for the mail, and when I returned to my desk, I still could not begin.

But as it turned out, the writing block did not materialize. In fact, my experience at Cummington, which was a poetry-producing one after all, leads me to hypothesize that there are no such things as writing blocks, at least not as they are conventionally defined. My first reaction to finding myself at an artists' colony with a month free for writing was to tighten up, to allow the enormity of my expectations to keep me from working. The circumstances at Cummington magnified the pressure to write I have felt, not usually in poetry writing, but in beginning many prose assignments, and often during the progress of my writing in any form. I have often experienced an inability to write either what I've wanted, or as well as I've wanted. I have fought with writing tasks that were unpleasant; I've procrastinated and complained, and I have found myself, as I was at Cummington, unable to work. However, even at those times, I am always able to write something.

There is a sense in which I was blocked about the poem I was attempting to begin, but I cannot be said to have had a writing block, for the evidence of the drafts written that day (I saved all my drafts for a study I’m conducting on the composing process of poets) is that I had another poem to write. There are twelve lines on the first page of drafts, aborted attempts to begin a poem in response to the one by Barry Spacks, and then the second page begins with a phrase that shows up in the poem I completed several days and twenty worksheets later. The poem appears to be entirely unrelated to the lines on page one, and I remember the sense of resignation with which I gave up that page. Rather than fight to start a poem I couldn’t begin, rather than fight to start a poem at all, I began to just to write, and this led me to discover what I did have available to be written.

It seems to me that a writing block develops not in a writer’s ability to compose, but in one’s psychological capacity to accept a product that does not match one’s expectations. Mike Rose’s investigation ("Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block," College Composition and Communication, Dec. 1980) encourages this view. The tenacity with which the writers he studied hung onto inserviceable plans and rules kept them from efficiently completing writing tasks, but these students, while avoiding majors where writing is a large requirement, did finish written assignments and were, at the time of the research, near graduation. How did these "blocked writers" manage to write at all?

Rose’s students reported that they tackled assignments only at the last minute, and only with a sense of desperation. The ubiquitous practice of staying up all night to write papers seems to be the result not merely of poor planning or procrastination - procrastination could be called a symptom of the fear of writer's block - but is a viable antidote do the inability to meet one’s own expectations for a piece of writing, or to write as easily, or as well, as a writer thinks he should. When the deadline is only hours away, expectations must fall aside; the student is willing to accept anything that comes out of the typewriter as a draft, often the final draft, of the paper. The rule-bound writer breaks his own rules in desperation for something, anything, to turn in the next morning. In doing so he is finally (ironically) free to writer, to discover what he as to say. The skilled writer, I propose, is never blocked, but often finds herself unable to write as skillfully as she would wish, or has something that is more pressing to be written than the piece of writing she expected to produce. Letting go of these expectations frees the writer to begin, allows here to write something she did not, more accurately, could not, expect to write.

I find I need some assistance in doing this myself, though; it is easy to forget my own understanding of writer’s block when its symptoms threatening to erupt, so I've compiled the following list of suggestions and reminders to use on such occasions.

1. Assume that you are not blocked in your ability to write, but that the writing you are producing, or are capable at this moment of producing, does not match up to your expectations for yourself.
2. Instead of forcing yourself to write to these expectations, write what you have in you to write. You may need to write on another subject for a while, or you may need to write about the difficulty you are having with the topic. Any writing will do. Plan only to write, and leave aside any preconceptions about what you will write.
3. If you’ve thought about the subject for some time, you are probably somewhere in the middle, and not at the beginning, where you are trying, quite logically, to begin. You may even be at the conclusion. (My composing process study began on page 43. I could not write page one, but when I typed "43" at the top of the page, I found that I was able to write from the middle of the project.)
4. Make all initial writing freewriting. You may or may not want to try to write straight through a draft, but at least freewrite each time you are stuck. Let yourself write in any direction, and then you’ll have something to refine later.
5. Resist the temptation to continually reread what you have written. Sheridan Blau's work with "invisible writing" ("Invisible Writing: Investigating Cognitive Process in Composition," College Composition and Communication, forthcoming), suggests that composing without looking at the words as they appear on the page is a useful technique for writing a difficult passage. When he is not looking at his words, the writer's attention is forced to be more fully on the content, and is not drawn so much to the form of what he is writing.
6. Try writing for a different audience, or in another genre. For example, write a letter instead of an essay, or write an essay for a specific individual.
7. Try changing the technical aspects of composing. If you are writing with a pen, switch to a typewriter; find another location in which to work; allow yourself to write for only fifteen minutes at a time.
8. Remember that all writing is work-in-progress and can be revised at any time.

This suggestion list has been of help to me already. I am still unable to write the first 42 pages of my study, but I've managed, in the meantime, to write this article.


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(If you want a .PDF of this for yourself, here's the link.)



I read that thing twice. After walking back up to him I stated with great confidence that I finally believed his mantra. His response was a simple nod of approval and a stare that seemed to say "You know what to do now." I offered to return the paper, but he told me to keep it so I could be reminded about the truth. (He also said something about it also serving as a metaphorical head smack.)

Now, what's my view on artist's block? I say it exists and that it doesn't simultaneously. While it's not real and just a mental wall we artists subconsciously construct in front of our paths, the phenomenon of it occurring - along with the near-panicked response we get after stumbling upon it - are very, very real. It's what we do to stand up against the bully and say "No more!" that determines whether or not we make the block real.

Like Cherryl Armstrong, I originally ended up wanted to work on a different project. Instead, I re-read her little ditty and ended up typing up today's entry. Hopefully, by posting this up here (along with my story and belief on artist's block), I've helped an artist out there tackle their own artist's block of a bully.



To this day, whenever I (supposedly) get an artist's block, I imagine my high school English teacher smacking me upside the head and pull up a copy of Cherryl Armstrong's document (sadly, I lost the original he gave me - good thing I typed up a copy beforehand) and read through it, just to remind myself that it's all just in my head. Usually that train of thought is enough of a metaphorical uppercut to knock back the bully and allow me to work. I don't think I've had much problems with artist's block since.







Well, until the 'morrow, everyone. Take care, and have fun slugging that bastard in the face with this entry!