Lilith Saintcrow says there’s no such thing. It’s true that I’ve never in my life been unable to write a sentence. Even when not writing fiction I’ve written emails, essays, journal entries, articles, nonfiction of all kinds. All of which is clearly writing. But there is a kind of coming to a stop in fiction that I think happens for multiple reasons, and the only way to get past your stop is to find out your cause and cure.

I’ve come to a stop in a project more than once because there was a problem. The stop was my subconscious cue: “Something isn’t working here, back up and fix it.” Of course, the first few times this happened I didn’t know that’s what it meant and ran around panicking instead of backing up to find the problem. But this is still my #1 reason for coming to a dead stop; I can’t write forwards because I need to write backwards. Somewhere behind me is a structural problem that will cause the whole thing to collapse if I don’t go back, find it, and fix it.

As I’ve grown in my craft, these have gone from being seemingly permanent halts to brief hiccups in the writing process. I’ve gotten to be an experienced story mechanic. I get underneath the hood and start digging around and trouble-shooting and I can isolate and identify the problem in fairly short order now. Followed by implementing the solution. If you experience this kind of stop, craft is what’s needed to get past it.

Reason #2 for fictional standstill is kind of a cosmic slap upside the head in the form of muse withdrawal. What’s muse withdrawal? If you want to experience it, dictate to your writing instead of letting your writing dictate to you. Writing fiction is art and craft and business. The art part gets downplayed because we don’t want to seem like flaky people and also probably because the unknown and unseen makes people nervous so nobody likes to admit it exists. Especially people who write checks to other people who commune with the unknown and unseen to produce, say, a work of fiction.

What happens when you dictate to the muse to write something it doesn’t want to write? The muse is playful and helpful and will be a good sport and play your game for a while. But it’ll keep asking “when’s my turn? When are we going to play my game?” And if the answer is never, the muse will eventually pick up bat and ball and stop coming over to play. At which point, you take your cosmic slap and apologize.

Maybe this is a good experience, to keep us humble. Maybe sometimes we need a reminder that the business isn’t in charge, the craft isn’t in charge, that the heart of fiction is art and we have to honor it. That the slogan “Art Saves Lives” isn’t just something hippies in Port Townsend paste on bumper stickers. Art saves lives, and it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize how deeply and personally true this is for me. I need my art to live. And that’s why I write, why I wrote for years when I wasn’t published, why I wrote stories instead of continuing to write greeting cards because I only had so much writing time and I chose to spend it on what fed my art instead of what I was selling.

If it comes to a choice between what I need to write and what I can sell, there’s no real choice. I know this from experience, because I can’t do this alone and the muse will abandon me if I don’t play his/her game. (My muse has no gender but does have a nickname. “Elvis” is probably disrespectful, but I go with it because it’s aptly descriptive; when Elvis has left the building, the show’s over.)

So. Do you have writer’s block? Maybe you need to turn story mechanic. It takes a long time and a lot of experience to learn this craft, without which you have no support for art, so be patient with your education. Do you need to apologize to your muse and stop stifling your own voice? Do it, the sooner the better. The one thing you can’t do in fiction is lie.

Last reason for fiction stoppage (and I’m talking reasons beyond being fearful or lazy, real reasons you can’t get past by steeling yourself and throwing yourself at the job over and over) is physical. If you really can’t write, maybe it’s not in your head or a problem of art or craft. Get a checkup. It may be an early symptom of an underlying issue that’s threatening your health, not just your ability to put words on the page.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.