Jeremiah Tolbert

When I first began writ­ing in earnest, I didn’t believe in writer’s block.  You know how it is.  When you’re com­pletely lack­ing in self-​​consciousness about your works, it’s much eas­ier to get things done.  Doubt hasn’t entered the pic­ture then, nor a dozen other ever-​​present con­cerns, experience-​​driven instincts, and mild pho­bias that you develop with time.  These things are internal-​​process bar­na­cles that form as an outer crust on the hull of your cre­ativ­ity.  They weigh you down a bit, but when the wind is right, you sail straight enough despite them.   The sail­ing is smooth and easy at first with­out them, but you prob­a­bly have no real des­ti­na­tion in mind, and the sail­ing is so smooth that it’s down­right bor­ing to any pas­sen­gers along for the ride.

Since my days of proto-​​writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve dis­cov­ered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a vari­ety of causes. Because writ­ing is a damned bor­ing thing to talk about lit­er­ally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encoun­tered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me rely­ing on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most com­mon block to my writ­ing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The dri­ving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind aban­don me?  Why does the wind do any­thing?  The fac­tors are too com­plex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspi­ra­tion can come from a lot of dif­fer­ent places, mostly deep inter­nal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel com­fort­able exam­in­ing too closely.  It feels like frag­ile machin­ery that would be too easy to dis­turb when it’s work­ing right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tin­ker­ing for fear of break­ing some­thing completely.

When faced with a lack of inspi­ra­tion, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySar­gasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remem­ber the god­damned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a cor­ner often, espe­cially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writ­ing for the fun of the jour­ney and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after con­ceiv­ing of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envi­sion the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a bet­ter des­ti­na­tion along the way, there was no rea­son I couldn’t change course!  My plans or out­lines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of lit­tle more than a vague idea and a half-​​sketched out char­ac­ter con­cept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you dis­cover your ini­tial con­cept is full of holes (made by the worm­rot of the implau­si­bil­i­tus, incon­sis­ten­tia, or been-​​there-​​done-​​that-​​allia species).  Now you find your­self sink­ing, maybe bail­ing for your life with a lit­tle hand wav­ing, but the boat’s tak­ing on the waters of dis­be­lief and some of your pas­sen­gers aren’t going to see the jour­ney to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scut­tle a lot of story boats this way delib­er­ately.  The ini­tial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail imme­di­ately with­out any plan­ning at all, buoyed by the excite­ment of the fresh­ness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I dis­cover the flaws in my half-​​assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve prob­a­bly aban­doned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever fin­ished.  I was a strong swim­mer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-​​edit while I’m work­ing on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up com­pletely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-​​editors, voices of self-​​doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempt­ing to give in and lis­ten to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voy­age, but they’re not com­pletely worth­less.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voy­age, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1^st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his sub­con­scious Bob, but I tend to call my sub­con­cious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s cre­ative and all, but he doesn’t have any con­cept of the real­i­ties of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sail­ing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to bal­ance a check­book or even earn a decent liv­ing, but the bas­tard knows how to sail bet­ter than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like lis­ten­ing to the sea­soned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters bet­ter than any­one.  When you fail to lis­ten,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the dif­fi­culty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he orig­i­nates from some­where in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to draw­ing vague pic­tures, ges­tur­ing wildly in some ridicu­lous game of conscious/​subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep sched­ules, so we have to leave mes­sages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, what­ever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amaz­ing we have ever com­pleted a voy­age together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to com­plet­ing my jour­neys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leak­ing like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wear­ing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at cre­ative block in the abstract, it’s much more intim­i­dat­ing.  Abstract con­cepts aren’t eas­ily defeated, but when I con­cretize the idea into a giant tuber wear­ing an eye-​​patch, it sud­denly seems so much eas­ier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

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Tags: creativity, My Writing, sailing, writer's block