“I Can’t Look You in the Voice”
The above image was making the rounds in my social media neighborhoods last week. It told me two things:
1. Even people like Dorothy Parker suffered from writer’s block.
2. Dorothy Parker’s writing about writer’s block was more entertaining than a lot of my actual writing. I mean, “I can’t look you in the voice?” So simple, and yet it says so much.
And last week was a very good week indeed to see that telegram.
There are times when I’ve written down a quick outline and know exactly how I want a story to go. But then I start to write the actual story and the words won’t come and the words still won’t come no matter how much I sigh and stare at Scrivener.
And when the words do come, I hate them. I grit my teeth and force myself to get a paragraph down, and then I look it over and it’s so beyond terrible that the light from Planet Terrible would take eons to reach it. In my head the story I want to tell is a Turner, a Cassatt, a Van Gogh, but what I’m getting down is fingerpaint splats on paper torn out of a spiral notebook.*
It’s beyond frustrating; it’s scary. Writing is the one thing I’ve always had, the one thing I could rely on even when I was making a mess of all the other things. When it feels like writing has abandoned me, I wonder if this is the time that it will never come back.
Sometimes when I get like this, there’s nothing to be done but to get up and go do something else for a while. Go for a walk. Go see a movie. Go have dinner with someone. Anything that will stop making me think about Writing the Thing for a few hours.
And it helps to know that famous writers go through it too. I know they all say they do, and I believe them because why wouldn’t it happen to them? But to see someone like Dorothy Parker writing from the actual throes of deep frustration, just like I was experiencing? That means something.
And in the end, Parker is right. I can only keep at it and hope to heaven to get it done. I frown at the monitor and push out paragraph after paragraph, telling myself that once it’s down, I can clean it up. I can look it over in the harsh light of morning and see what needs to be fixed.
The resulting work may not be the best, but the victory is in its completion. It means that the self-doubt didn’t win. It didn’t break me. The thing is done.
Maybe the next time will be easier.
*I had an English teacher in high school who called the torn perforations down the margin of spiral notebook paper “smurgles.” She didn’t want you turning in papers with smurgles running down the side; typed pages or smurgle-less notebook paper, if you please. Remember, my grade school years were in the era before computers and word processors were commonplace.
That has nothing to do with anything, but I thought “smurgles” was an awesome word. Still do. My spellcheck hates it, though.
