A few weeks back, I gave a talk on feeling stuck. When I asked the audience for a show of hands — who’s struggled with writers’ block before? — sixty arms lifted without hesitation. It seems to be nearly universal among writers, that experience of staring at the screen in vain, certain the words will never come. And yet, for something so common, writers’ block remains surprisingly mysterious. We tend to experience it as a dark and inscrutable force, almost supernatural, a bad spell cast by someone other than ourselves.
This was at the University of Iowa, and it was something of a homecoming for me. I was in town to give a couple lectures, and also to read from my novel at Prairie Lights, a bookstore I frequented during my time as an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I hadn’t visited for a decade or so, and I found it thrilling to return, the city streets and campus buildings freighted with memory. Maybe it was the high density of literary types jamming out drafts at coffee shop tables, or the prep work I was doing for my talk on getting stuck, but I kept flashing back to one kind of memory in particular: how joyful writing felt when I lived in Iowa, a pursuit as easy and spontaneous as child’s play.
When I lived in Iowa City, I don’t remember ever struggling with writers’ block at all. I don’t recall sitting stymied in front of my laptop, or glaring at a notebook’s blank page, waiting for the clouds to part and words to fall like rain. Not that everything was perfect. I usually finished stories late at night, under duress, with a workshop deadline looming. There were plenty of false starts and failed projects, things I started with abandon and discarded later. And much of the material I generated was straight-up bad, pieces that make me wince inwardly when I think about them now.
What I wasn’t, though, was stuck. For some reason, for three years in Iowa, writing came as naturally as breath, as reliably as dreams follow a deep sleep.
After grad school I moved back to New York, and there I lost my way. Day after day, I sat uselessly at my desk, desperate to enter that delicate, dream-like state of mind that allows for a creative outpouring. I spent most of my time working various jobs, lost in the endless logistics of making a living. I was desperate to make my limited writing time count. But most of the time, it amounted to nothing, or next to nothing.
I remember thinking of myself as a kind of sad magician, one who had spent years pulling a rabbit out of a hat in front of a live audience. I myself didn’t know how the trick worked; I only knew that when I reached into the hat, I’d always feel the heat of a huddled body, those restless ears, that reassuring scruff of fur. So I counted on the rabbit to be there. But one day, nothing. When I reached my hand inside to do the trick, I felt only the hollow of an empty hat.
It felt mysterious to me, a sudden and inexplicable loss of power. The magic had run out, but I didn’t know why. Now, though, I’ve come to understand what happened better — and I believe, whether you see yourself as an artist or not, that this kind of blockage can affect us all. The inner force that stops the pen from scratching can also thwart our desire to make a difference, to summon the best parts of ourselves and do some good in this world.
***
We get blocked, I tell my students, when our ambitions for our writing outpace what we can realistically achieve. When we want more from the process than we can reasonably expect, we get stuck.
Writing, after all, follows desire. The desire to know ourselves. The desire to say what we feel. The desire to connect with others. The desire to use language artfully — to make a sentence snap and quiver. Or the desire to make something beautiful that endures. There is also the desire to impress others. The desire to publish. The desire to get back at people who have wronged us. The desire to be as successful as our friends, or to enjoy the apparent happiness of our heroes. The desire to make something so good it alters our material circumstances forever. The desire to change the world.
When we write, we face down all that want.
None of the desires we channel into our writing — the ones I’ve mentioned, and the many other kinds I haven’t — are inherently bad or wrong. At worst, they are human; at best, they are the kind of altruistic impulse that makes life better and more worth living. The problem, though, is that our wants are badly out of scale with what — on most days — writing can actually be. An hour or two spent writing cannot possibly satisfy our hunger for beauty, for connection, for success, for happiness, for a more just and tolerable earth.
When the desires we project onto writing cannot be reasonably achieved, we falter. How could it be any other way? The pressure we put on ourselves to say exactly what we feel, to make a million bucks, to ennoble humanity with timeless poetry, etc. only sets us up to fail. Whether these are worthy goals is not really the point. Our deeper, driving wants can only be satisfied over the course of a lifetime, and maybe not even then, but certainly not in a single day’s work. It is unreasonable and unfair to expect so much from a few hours’ tinkering with language.
Writers’ block is what results when we refuse to recognize the disparity between our desires and what we can actually do. Faced with the demands of our overblown expectations, we do the predictable: We freeze.
This is exactly what made my first years back in New York so difficult. In Iowa, living comfortably in a cheap town on a teaching assistant’s salary, with few material worries and no hopes for success except submitting something good for class next week, the writing came easily. My ambitions and my abilities were in harmony. But in New York, that simplicity fell away. I’d just gotten married. I’d just gotten an agent. I needed money to survive in a famously expensive city, the center of the publishing world. And suddenly I was bringing all kinds of new expectations to the desk.
The novel I was working on? It needed to be GREAT. It needed to be a thing of such supreme, unmistakable quality that my agent would have no trouble selling it. And it needed to come together quickly, so I could move onto the even bigger, better things that waited in my professional life.
Of course, my daily writing practice couldn’t possibly support these desires. Every single word I typed felt tragically — and sometimes comically — insufficient. With each sentence, I felt the profound inadequacy of my language to support the dreams I had. And as the pain of that became more unbearable, it became easier not to write at all. At least, with my words unwritten, I could still fool myself into believing that other, different, better words could somehow make all my wishes — my wants — come true.
Writer’s block. I had it bad.
I was so desperate to do it right, to make each writing session count toward some concrete artistic or professional goal, that I could no longer give myself over to what the experience really was: an attempt to generate some pages in the time I had. Soon all that was left was dread, the terror of not being good enough. To free myself from that feeling, I had to do something that felt radical at the time. I had to stop caring so much. I had to lower my expectations. I had to give myself the latitude to fail, except in the most basic respect: Did I, or did I not, show up? And were some words — any words — committed to the page?
All I needed to do, I realized, was answer both questions with a resounding yes. That was the best I could hope for. But if I succeeded, it meant I’d won. For that day, at least.
I did worry that I was saying goodbye to all my literary dreams — my desire to connect to others through artful language, and tell a story good enough to last. But I also sensed I had no choice. If I was ever to achieve something greater, I’d need to start from a humbler place. So I let my wants go and streamlined my ambition into something leaner. From then on, I had only one goal for my writing time: to write.
Not to write transcendently. Not even to write well. Certainly not to write something finished and publishable, let alone enduringly good. My goal became merely to put words on paper, page after page, to be set aside and reevaluated later. Maybe I was writing the worst fiction ever attempted — it didn’t matter. What mattered was the act itself, nothing more or less. In other words, my goal was to stop thinking so much about product and to immerse myself instead in process.
This was achievable. This, finally, I could do.
Then, a surprise. With no audience to please except myself, without the weight of all those lofty goals, I started to have fun again. I rediscovered the joy I’d found so effortlessly in Iowa. Not only that. Opening myself up to the potential for bad writing, paradoxically, allowed me to write well.
Don’t get me wrong. Most of what I wrote, for years, was unpublishable. I drafted hundreds of pages that never made it into my book, that will never find a home in any book. Still, these hours were anything but useless. Almost without fail, I’d stumble onto some glimmer of an idea, some arresting turn of phrase, some character insight that felt indelible. The value was not necessarily in those specific details. It was in learning how to get to them more reliably, building up the kind of muscle memory we recognize as craft.
Sometimes, the benefit is more about learning what doesn’t work. When I tried a theme or plot motion or narrative style only to see it fail, it could be an odd relief — that was something I could rule out. An item to cross off my list of possible approaches. And with each mistake, I got closer to what I wanted. And over time, over many, many sessions of writing without expectation, the thing started to take on the kind of weight and significance I’d yearned for during the months I wrestled with writer’s block, long before I’d done the work. I could see a novel emerging, something that may one day sustain some of the professional ambitions I’d projected onto it — impatiently, petulantly, and to my own detriment — way too soon.
After seven years, I sold the book.
***
Through it all, I’ve worked as a journalist covering food and environmental issues. That’s still how I make most of my living, though pivoting between deadline-driven reporting and fiction sometimes stretches me to my limit. But I generally feel grateful to be able to do both, especially when I hit on surprising links between the two professional worlds I inhabit.
I came upon one recently as I work toward a new project about the forces that keep people from engaging in climate action. Most people are at least somewhat worried about climate change, research suggests. And yet very few people are actually doing anything about it — just 8 percent of Americans, according to one study from Yale and George Mason. Even among the smaller group of Americans who say they’re “extremely worried” about climate change, very few are taking any action (only about a quarter of them). A clear dynamic emerges from the numbers: We feel too much and do too little.
If this is how we (im)mobilize in response to our worries about climate, one suspects the same holds true for collapse more broadly. Behavioral psychologists are still trying to better understand this disconnect, which some call the “attitude-behavior gap.” And I can’t help wondering if it’s something akin writers’ block, those internal forces that cause inertia at the desk.
As with writing, our desire for environmental justice can quickly outpace what we can realistically achieve. We want to take action that matters now. We want change now. We want to stop the exploitation of land and people now. And if we are going to take time out of our stressful, precarious lives — often made more stressful and precarious by the same economic and political systems that are causing climate change — we want an assurance that our actions fundamentally matter somehow, that our efforts won’t be in vain.
Unfortunately, we have no guarantee of that. Politics, grassroots activism, direct action, volunteering, awareness raising, community building — these things are messy. They take time. They always feel a little cruder and less perfect than the glistening thing we dream about, and they run into many snags and setbacks. In that sense, they’re a little bit like our artistic works-in-progress, unrefined and forever coming into being. And like those works-in-progress, we can’t know in advance what will succeed, or whether our hours will one day feel worthwhile.
It’s painful not to know.
Faced with that uncertainty, we tend to just shut down. Even when the stakes are urgent, and maybe especially then. When we weigh our small, striving actions against the enormity of the task, they barely register. It can feel easier, safer, wiser to do nothing at all. And so nothing gets done.
But dealing with writers’ block at the desk has taught me something about how to move through the world. Writing reminds me that there is value in simply doing — doing as a statement of values, doing as an act of devotion to an as-yet-unachieved ideal.
It’s true: We can’t change the world in an afternoon, in writing or in activism. To try is to despair. But there is joy in showing up, in performing the love of what we love, without expectation. That’s a humble ambition. It’s also the boldest gesture I know. Because grandeur rests upon the small. And magic — the real-world kind — isn’t possible without the humility that allows words to gather on a page, people to assemble in a room, or voices to lift together. We give up too soon, wanting everything. But when we embrace our smallness, and shove on anyway, the big wheel starts to turn.