A Blessed Silence: On Solving Writer’s Block by Accepting It

Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own approach to writer’s block in a way that sounds like a practical instantiation of Ms. Nelson’s insights.

In her book’s final chapter, titled “Active Silence,” Nelson wrote:

All kinds of silences, unscheduled and unexplained, are likely to fall into every writer’s life. . . . But silence is not a condition that demands rectification every time. Even for a writer, silence is not always, or even mostly, a bad thing.

Silence is often as blessed a condition as its opposite. Writing/not writing represents a natural alternation of states, an instinctive rhythm that lies at the heart of the creative process. . . . For every writer who is a relentlessly systematic worker, another is not. For every writer who allows a month of silence to fall between works, another allows a year.

Some silences in a writing life may be blameworthy (that is, to fall silent when it is one’s moral duty to speak up), but most are likely to be not merely “acts of God” but central experiences of the creative life — the negative space that surrounds and supports every act of art. The silence merely is; only the writer errs in refusing its right to existence. . . .

Blaming oneself for low productivity . . . is punishment for a crime that did not exist until it was named. An uneven artistic output, for many, is a natural condition of creativity. . . .

When you, as a writer, find yourself in the middle of a silence, consider above all treating it with dignity. Resist your first impulse to squash it like a bug; you are likely to fail in this attempt, in any event. . . . Give the unconscious some credit. You may never know exactly why it has drawn back from you, but you must respect its need to do so. For the time being, you must concede the fact that it is not in your control; you are in its control.

Victoria Nelson, On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 162-3, 167, 168

I can’t tell you how many times, and how deeply, these words have consoled me during the silent periods in my own writer’s life, which have been many and long-lived. (I’ve also been helped by copious amounts of sitting meditation and the active embrace of silence and disidentification from the mind that accompanies it. And this hasn’t been at all separate from the wisdom in Nelson’s book. But that’s a story for another time and another post.)

And now, in a newly published interview for Literary Hub, here’s Brandon Taylor talking about his personal approach to writer’s block, which he both acknowledges as real (to his credit; I’ve had conversations and even spoken on panels where I’ve been obligated to vouch for the reality of the state to people who deny it) and handles in a way whose description is virtually as consoling as Nelson’s advice, though it lacks the part about affirming silence as a blessed state in its own right:

LITERARY HUB: What time of day do you write?

BRANDON TAYLOR: I don’t have a preference. You write when you write and you don’t when you don’t. Nothing to be gained from trying to min/max your way to creating art. It’s art, not a dietary regimen. But I think, if there’s a certain time of day you personally feel most productive, then, that’s when you should write. For myself, I don’t know, it happens when it happens and doesn’t when it doesn’t. I don’t have a copy-paste macro that I can apply and suddenly have a book after a certain number of days. Art may be a process, but I don’t think we get much out of trying to life-hack our way to creating literature. Every process and every book is so individual.

LH: How do you tackle writers block?

BT: I don’t. When I’m blocked, I’m blocked. Trying to force myself to write just makes me miserable and sometimes culminates in a psychiatric emergency. So I’ve learned to just back off and let it work itself out. I don’t like not writing, but I’ve accepted that there are just going to blank periods in my life when I can’t. So I read and go on walks and just put it out of my mind and when it’s time, I’ll be able to write again. Or maybe I never will. I just try to accept the possibility that the last thing I wrote might be the last thing I ever write, and in that way, writers block isn’t so tragic. It’s just a part of life.

“Brandon Taylor: Writers Block Is Not Tragic (It’s a Part of Life)“