Cursing the Cursor: The Myth of Writer’s Block
Witty has writer’s block
For many students, few things are more daunting than a blinking cursor on a blank screen. It’s not exactly the most encouraging signal, conditioned as we are by hospital dramas to regard rhythmic flashes of light as signs life will soon be extinguished. Must… write…or perish…beeeeeep…flatiline. Writer’s block as existential horror.
Don’t let the title fool you. I’m not here to argue away writer’s block. I’m here to explore the myth they way one explores UFOs, Sasquatch, and Nessie–with equal parts healthy skepticism and epistemic humility.
Writer’s block exists in precisely the way UFOs exist—on the strength of belief. If someone believes–I mean really believes–then that belief matters, and if it matters, it’s real enough. That the words aren’t landing matters to the writer about to hit a deadline like a crash-test dummy. It’s not whether writer’s block exists, but why.
Why do so many of us feel nausea and dread at the thought of tapping out some pixelated squiggles and stringing along a few morphemes? Welp, I might not have the final answer, but I will offer a conjecture based on a quarter century of teaching freshman comp.
We’ve been taught wrong. There. I said it. I’m not saying all writing teachers are incompetent; l’m saying if you experience writer’s block, then yours likely was.
Cause 1: Write like you speak.
Speaking is natural; writing is artificial. Speaking is biologically endowed; writing is culturally acquired. Speaking is the meaningful patterned vibration of airwaves; writing is the meaningful arrangement of arbitrary visual symbols. Telling aspiring writers to write like they speak is like telling aspiring dancers to dance like they walk.
Cause 2: Write an essay for homework.
And while you’re at it, compose a score, paint a masterpiece, and sculpt a marble bust. All of these tasks are block inducing because the simple imperative implies the task is monolithic. Imagine your teacher demanded you paint Raphael’s School of Athens for homework. What’s more, you must paint from the upper leftmost corner of the canvas, moving only left to right, and finishing in the lower rightmost corner. That’s what “Write an essay for homework” sounds like to many students. In other words, impossible.
Cause 3: Write only facts.
What? First, define “fact,” teach. Second, if my job is to procure for you well-established facts, I’m not a writer; I’m a middleman. A writer does not purvey facts; a writer shares a unique point of view–the one and the ONLY unique thing anyone has to offer.
I could–but won’t–go on. Instead, I will suggest a strategy. Permit me another metaphor. Imagine you are tasked with making a clay coffee mug. When completed, the mug is to weigh 8 oz. Do you start with exactly 8 oz. of clay? No, you throw a big ol’ slab of clay on the potter's wheel then pull away what you don’t need.
The above causes, taken together, suggest creation is a natural process of accretion. When it fails to be so, we are blocked. We’re told to just speak truth to page, and an essay will magically appear. No. Good writers, like good musicians, painters, and sculptures, doodle. They mess around. Throw many more ideas, images, and data on the page than will end up in the final draft.
Why? Because creation is the process of deletion–start with more than you need and take away what doesn’t contribute. I did not arrange the words in this essay like beads on a string. They are what’s left from a much longer “messay,” from the heaping slabs of words I threw down with abandon (it was fun). Then I saw a shape implicit in the slabs and spun and pulled until I found this.
The cursor isn’t the problem. The myth is. Creation begins with excess, not absence. Throw down more than you need and carve your way out.
Now, when the cursor blinks, blink back. One of you has to move first. Spoiler: it’s not the cursor.
