2.9: Writer’s Block Just Happens to People

Author: Geoffrey V. Carter, English, Saginaw Valley State University 

Whenever someone trying to write says that they are suffering from writer’s block, the first word that comes to my mind could be misunderstood as uncharitable: slacker.

At the end of this short essay, I will tell you why the word slacker pops into my mind, but first I want to share some thoughts regarding Edmund Bergler, the person who first developed the term writer’s block. Bergler was Sigmund Freud’s assistant director at the Vienna Clinic in the 1930s. Bergler made all sorts of outrageous claims, not the least of which was his ability to completely cure the malady he coined. Of all Bergler’s unsubstantiated psychological declarations, this was the one that bothered me the most. When I think about Bergler’s example, what comes to mind are writing techniques that I use to circumvent writer’s block rather than further pathologize it.

As a writer myself, I know that writing doesn’t always come easily. Fortunately, I’ve always been good at researching things before I really start writing. I was puzzled, for example, by a claim made by those who had previously studied Bergler: Bergler, evidently, had claimed that he had a 100% cure rate when it came to the malady he had invented. And yet, purportedly, Bergler never explained exactly how he treated this problem. Surely, I thought to myself, he would have mentioned a strategy somewhere. Delving deeper into such puzzling claims is an important step in a writing process and, for me, such work often alleviates the feeling of having writer’s block.

While searching through his work, I waded through Bergler’s pontifications on the frigidity of women and his rejection of homosexuality. (Bergler seriously limited his own dating pool with such proclamations.) Along the way, I found an article that gave him credit for articulating a logical connection between gambling and masochism. Perhaps Bergler wasn’t completely off his rocker, even if he wasn’t able to see past Freud’s sexual hang-ups or see fit to disclose his alleged cure for writer’s block. In all, I could only find one trivial tactic that Bergler shared—inadvertently, perhaps—in one of his clinical session anecdotes.

Before I share this anecdote, I want to mention how it reinforces some of the other strategies for overcoming writer’s block that I’ve come across. These strategies were noted both before and after Bergler’s time. The hesitation to write, after all, has been around since we’ve been trying to write. Whenever we stare at a blank page, we’re in good company.

Perhaps the funniest piece of scholarship that I’ve ever encountered about the good company of a blank page is one that was actually published in an academic journal. It can be found in the 1974 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, if you care to track it down yourself. (I certainly would not have delved into this journal had others not mentioned it in connection to Bergler.) When I requested this journal from the library, I most certainly wasn’t looking for a laugh. But author Dennis Upper’s entire article was summed up in the title—“The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer’s Block”—because the rest of the article (no joke) is a blank page with a footnote that it was “published without revision” following its presentation at the 81st Annual American Psychological Association Convention the year before and a note from a reviewer who vetted its inclusion into the journal: “Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen—yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr. Upper’s failure.” Who knew that it would be serious business to publish a blank page in an academic journal that, at the time, had been publishing for over half a century?

The humor of this article often causes people to smile. Curiously, however, just as many people scoff at the idea of a non-article. I’m not sure why the publishing of a blank page amuses some but is an affront to others, but I have another story about writer’s block that might offer a key.

Back in the 18th century, there was a French schoolteacher and philosopher named Joseph Jacotot who put bad ideas about writer’s block to the test with the help of an illiterate Flemish locksmith. Contrary to commonly held opinion at the time, Jacotot believed that everyone—regardless of cultural hierarchy—had the capacity

for equal intelligence. His notion of intellectual emancipation led him to guide an illiterate locksmith in reading and comprehending a 17th-century French treatise. Rather than insisting his locksmith learn through a traditional abécédaire (i.e., learning letters before learning words before learning meaning and so forth), Jacotot’s philosophy was simple: “Everything is in everything.” He operated under an assumption that it is always easier to utilize what his learners already knew. Thus the first name mentioned in the aforementioned treatise, “Calypso,” was understood by the locksmith’s recognition of the square and the round to identify what more traditional learners would label as L and O.

Jacotot’s “everything is in everything” tact is one that I’ve come to feel embodies my approach to writing: As I was exploring Bergler, I was researching a little bit of everything and incorporating a little bit of everything. I could tell Upper’s blank page was a clue, and as I listened to Jacotot’s story about the locksmith playing with names, I was getting down with a tactic only hinted at in Bergler’s work.

And this is where I come back ‘round to Bergler and an anecdote he briefly shared about one of his writer’s block patients. As it turns out, the patient said he “unlocked his [own] literary resources” by playing with his psychiatrist’s name: Bergler. Whether the patient was calling Bergler out as a burglar for taking his money when he was solving his own problem can’t be verified. But the key here— and yes, key is a punny reference to the illiterate locksmith—is the idea that one can facilitate writing by embracing the blank page, by remembering “everything is in everything,” and by playing with words and names. Doing so, I believe, negates the very problem of writer’s block.

These stories about writer’s block lead me to suggest that it might be useful to experiment with playing with names to get one’s writing process underway. It’s simple. By looking at your own name and the names of others, we might find puns and anagrams to help move writing along. Bergler–Burglar is simple, but as “everything is in everything,” even finding a certain glee in a name is permissible. I find such play with names and words loosens me up, and perhaps this might help others who feel frustrated or blocked too.

It all comes down to this: When faced with the process of creating something, rather than just giving up, writing about anything that comes to mind—even if it is just fooling around with words— can sometimes motivate real work. Being playful, after all, often leads to storytelling about why one is being playful. If this can be accepted, the reason why the word slacker comes to my mind is revealed as the prospect of being more than someone who simply isn’t trying hard enough.

Before I leave you with a final impression of myself as having contempt for someone struggling to create, let me clarify that my first thought, mentioned at the start of this piece, is of the movie Slacker (1991). This movie, written and directed by Richard Linklater, is one that on paper looks like a bad idea—a really bad idea. There are no big stars, no plotline, no main characters or character development, no traditional theatrical structure, no dramatic music—indeed, there’s no soundtrack at all. Slacker has no special effects or any real action, and, as such, it contains nothing that a Hollywood Feature would usually feature.

But despite the nonexistence of all these traditional elements, this film is a masterpiece of the mundane. For the entirety of the movie, for a full one hour and forty minutes, nothing of consequence happens. But it is just brilliant. Nothing happens, and yet the film works.

One character from Slacker, in particular, is an aspiring writer at a coffee shop. At his scene’s start, he is sitting, waiting for a friend. As he waits, we hear him in the background expounding on ideas for what he hopes will be the next Great American Novel. When his friend approaches his table, our aspiring writer forgoes the usual, friendly salutations and, instead, immediately enlists his friend into the fever of his writing brainstorm. The aspiring writer’s various riffs—such as calling for “a full circle aesthetic re-evaluation”—make him sound like a pseudo-intellectual blowhard who, at one point, sees himself as the next Dostoevsky. But then—after all this talk about writing—our aspiring writer reaches a moment of clarity: “Who’s ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?” This line distills the essence of Slacker into a single sentence. Linklater, of course, captures this idea in his film’s title. The line is all about turning the struggle to write back upon itself in order to create. You have to try very hard in order not to create at all.

Further Reading

For further reading on the history of writer’s block and how writing teachers have contended with this idea, see Mike Rose’s When a Writer Can’t Write (The Guilford Press), which offers a series of essays on overcoming writer’s block. Additionally, to learn more about how the play of names might be used to overcome writer’s block, see my dissertation, Rereading and Rewriting Bloc/ ks: Teaching Multi-Modal Literacies Through an Apprenticeship in Proper Names (Proquest). Jacques Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford University Press) and Edmund Bergler’s article “Does ‘Writer’s Block’ exist?” (The American Imago) offer important historical examples of blocked writing. Of course, Dennis Upper’s article “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’” (Journal of Applied Behavior) needs to be seen to be believed. Better, still, is my recommendation that you link later to Richard Linklater’s movie, Slacker, and perhaps embrace the idea that telling the story about blocked writers may offer story enough.

Keywords

blank pages, play of names, puns, writer’s block

Author Bio

Geoffrey V. Carter is a tenured assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU), where he teaches undergraduate English classes and graduate courses in the communication and media administration program. His areas of interest include video culture, electracy, and post-cinematics. He has published articles in PRE/TEXT, Kairos, and Computers and Composition, and he has also edited a special issue on “Video and Participatory Cultures” for Enculturation and on “The Rhetoric of Pinball” for Itineration. He would like to thank his wife, Sara JacobsCarter, for her input on this essay and all her help with the dissertation upon which this is also based.