Joan Acocella on Writer’s Block

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, there’s an article by Joan Acocella about writer’s block.

Before [the early nineteenth century], writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity, which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred.

Acocella writes that besides being not as common in other times, it is also not as common in other cultures than the American; and in this context Europe is mentioned: “many Europeans today don’t seem to know what it is [and] the French and the Germans have no term for writer’s block.” I find this a bit strange; in Sweden, “writer’s cramp” (skrivkramp) is also used figuratively for writer’s block (and it’s probably far more common in this usage). August Strindberg and Stig Dagerman (pictured above) are perhaps the most well known examples of writers having suffered blockage.

Acocella has several examples of writers that debuted with books which were very well-received, and then suffered writer’s block for long periods or for the rest of their lives. I wonder if there’s a connection with the apparent fact that math is a young man’s game.

She also mentions Anthony Trollope as an example of the contrary:

Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography” [Amazon], he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next.

Later in the article, Jeffrey Eugenides is mentioned, who after his success with The Virgin Suicides worked for nine years with his next novel, Middlesex. He explains to Acocella that, besides being a more ambitions book, that he needed to regain “the blessed anonymity [he] had while writing ‘The Virgin Suicides’.” So he moved to Berlin. And thus, writes Acocella, he “survived second-novel syndrome”¹ – which reminds me of Frederick P. Brooks’s concept of the “second system effect,” where the planned replacement for a software system fails because every conceivable feature is to be included.

Acocella devotes a couple of paragraphs to the “biological theories of literary creativity” and lists a few guidelines offered by Jerrold Mundis in his Break Writer’s Block Now!², which reminds me of Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake³:

The idea is to remove your fear of writing [...] by controlling in your mind the size of your project (don’t start fantasizing about selling your novel to Hollywood), by thinking of what you’re writing as just a draft (don’t revise as you write), and, above all, by carefully scheduling your work and quitting the minute your assigned daily writing session is over (use a timer).

Finally, I found the concept of “dynamic nominalism” interesting, apparently coined by the philosopher Ian Hacking and explained by Acocella as the tendency that “once you invent a category [...] people will sort themselves into it, behave according to the description, and thus contrive new ways of being.”⁴

¹ I found a Village Voice article on second-novel syndrome, “Performance Anxiety,” by Joy Press. While skimming the first paragraphs of it, it seems that Acocella has a more accurate account of the case of Ralph Ellison. Also mentions Donna Tartt, which I thought of as I read the parts on Eugenides in Acocella’s article.

² The cover of Mundis’s book (“How to demolish it forever [...] A proven system”) and the accompanying website makes me rather skeptic, though.

³ For my notes on Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake, see my post “One Continuous Mistake, by Gail Sher.”

⁴ I was puzzled by Acocella’s using “the category of ‘homosexual’” as example when explaining dynamic nominalism, but it seems that she got this from Hacking himself.