Writer’s Block Examined

Great article in The New Yorker about writer’s block – the modern conception of it, the misconceptions about it, the developing understanding of the art of writing itself – the changing of styles.

I was especially struck by the part where Joyce Carol Oates (whom I love) – who is very prolific – she’s written 38 novels, countless essays, short stories – the woman is non-STOP – Anyway, I was very struck by the fact that many critics view her very speed of output as indicative that her work and her thought must be shallow.

[Oates] has had to answer rude questions about her rate of production. “Is there a compulsive element in all this activity?” one interviewer asked her.

Very interesting.

I’ve never really had writer’s block. I can always pick up a pen and just go. Whether or not the writing is GOOD is another story.

I’ve got other kinds of blocks, but not that one.

I remember reading Sylvia Plath’s journals (long ago – before they were re-issued in the un-edited version after Ted Hughes’ death) – She was one of those people in college who always has her eye on the ball, she kept obsessive reports on where she sent her poems out, how much magazines paid – She wrote gushing letters home to her mother (sometimes 3 or 4 letters a DAY) – telling her that this magazine published that poem, and on and on and on …

Her work was ever-flowing. She was an unbelievably driven individual, perfectionistic, and ambitious. Her early poems are a bit stilted – she hasn’t broken free into her own form yet – and you can FEEL, while reading her early stuff, that she composed them with a Thesaurus nearby.

Plath gets a Fulbright. Moves to England. Meets Ted Hughes. Bites him on the cheek at a raucous party of poets. They are married 4 months later. He was already considered a genius in many circles, his poems vibrant, mythical, filled with nature, and the smell of mud.

Hughes had a very craftsmanlike approach to his work. He sat down and he wrote everyday.

But from almost the moment Plath got married, her process shifted. She stopped being able to write. She tried. But it was a struggle. She looked up to Hughes, who was already on his way to becoming famous. Perhaps she looked up to him too much and that stifled her own voice. Who knows.

In 1959, the 2 of them left England – and both got teaching jobs at universities in Massachusetts.

And that’s where her real writer’s block began.

Ironically – it was being close to her mother (the very mother whom she used to write to obsessively about her writing – The ink was barely dry on the poem before she sent it off to her mother) that really stopped up Plath’s voice.

She didn’t write anything (besides her journal) for a year and a half. The journals of that time are agonizing to read.

Plath started to put it all together – over that terrible year and a half: She would offer up her poems to her mother, because she was desperate for approval. It was like getting an A on a pop quiz. Poetry wasn’t really art yet, to her – at least not in anything but an abstract art-appreciation kind of way. Her process was facile, the results a bit shallow – and poetry was way too connected to getting her mother to approve of her life.

Once she moved back to England with Hughes – her work took a turn. I have read the collected work of Sylvia Plath from beginning to end, and you can almost feel when she uncorks the bottle. The voices are as different as night and day.

Poets who had only known her as Hughes’ American wife, who knew her only from her stilted sonnets published in literary magazines, were shocked – that these rageful evocative funny MEAN (God, is she mean!) poems were written by the same woman.

Plath’s descriptions of her writer’s block – that time living in America – are painful, she felt like she was dying. Like her life had added up to nothing. Without her voice, she had nothing.

Maybe, though, it took that long dormant time of misery and living under some kind of self-imposed gag rule – to help her eventually bust out with such force.

Of course, she ended up committing suicide – so there is that element of her art to contend with as well – but I still find the entire topic very interesting.

Long tangent – didn’t mean to go off like that. If you’re interested in writers, here’s the article. Lots of good quotes.