Although I often suffer from its opposite, verbal diarrhea—that most unfortunate state in which mediocre words indiscriminately pour forth–no writer is a stranger to the dreaded squeak of the brain valve shutting off that is writer’s block.
My lexical obstruction often stems from the anxiety that what I create won’t be groundbreaking. On bleak days, I suffer from premonitions of shame—the nagging foreknowledge that what I’m fervently typing away at won’t be something that will cause me to beam. Yet I find that in writing, as in life, that stranglehold of perfectionism will only assure that I create less, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
In my bouts of blockage, the act of going on is what is commonly referred to as a leap of faith. But, on a deeper level, it’s what Kierkegaard thought of as a leap to faith. You don’t leap with knowledge that everything will be okay. The great hope on the other side of the leap is faith itself.
The concept is so powerful not because it is without doubt, but because it exists in the face of it. You will never stop having writer’s block, but you do have to take that writing leap, even when you have no faith that you’ll reach the other side of tour de force. In the end, the coup you stage is not against the block, but against your own voice that whispers, “you don’t have it in you.”
Abstract concepts aside, the single most effective laxative that I’ve found to combat textual constipation is stubbornness. You just have to storm past it, treating it as though it doesn’t exist. How do you do this? By never allowing yourself to stop writing, even if all you’re writing over and over is, “this is hogwash,” you must keep on writing. Sure, your output might look a little like Jack Torrance’s in The Shining from time to time, but you’re a writer; you’re allowed to be a little screwy.