writer's block

goodbye to my sanity

Wolfgang Tillmans, Kasper Konig’s bookshelf, 1995

Exciting news: we’re doing a Bookbear Express reader meetup in New York on Sunday, September 22nd! Cohosted with wonderful readers Annie, Justin and Terry. I will be there. Please come! (Also hello if you work at Substack and reading this can I get Substack stickers or something for this?)

I really don’t feel like writing this week. I’ve started this post about five times. Usually I’ll just write the first two or three sentences and everything else will just fluidly pour out. This week all the words that emerge feel wrong, but I can’t quite focus enough to figure out what the right ones would be. I’m simply not in the right state of mind.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about writer’s block. When people tell me they want to write more, I invariably tell them to read The Artist’s Way or The 90-Day Novel. Both of those books suggest committing to writing some number of words every day no matter how you’re feeling. In 2020, when I started writing consistently, I tried my best to write 1000 words a day. That’s still my philosophy today—I no longer enforce a word count, but I write every day.

For me, inspirational is very much cyclical. There will be months when I wake up every day with a crisp idea of exactly what I want to write. Everything is easy and abundant and I pray that it’ll remain this effortless forever. Then the dry season starts and I find myself staring at a blank Google doc. I get frustrated at myself—come on, just put something, anything, on the page. I write a paragraph and want to scream. I delete it. I write another paragraph. No good. I pick up the 400 page book on the table beside me—The Collected Poems of Gzeslaw Milosz. It says right there on the cover that he won the Nobel Prize in 1980. He probably never suffered from writer’s block a day in his life. Well, okay, I might as well give up on writing now. Oh my god, do I have no other career options? I can’t believe I was unlucky enough to be born a wordcel. Panic. People are probably unsubscribing from my Substack by the second. How am I going to pay my rent if I have writer’s block for the rest of my life? Okay, don’t freak out, this is probably a temporary state. Should I go to yoga class? No, too much exercise will sap my energy levels. More coffee? No, that will make me twitchy. Okay, remember that I’ve felt like this before and somehow I’ve been able to continue writing. Okay, maybe I can write something nostalgic, emotional. What about a post about how I’ve been writing the Substack for four years? Long projects, consistency, the passage of time. No, it’s boring. Who cares if I’ve been writing the Substack for four years? What about a book review? Okay, no, I don’t have the wherewithal to compose that. Okay, maybe just go do the laundry, put the dog toys back in the bin for a bit. Get my photos taken at Walgreens for my Chinese visitor visa. I can’t believe the visa application is so long. All these Substack writers I like are doing travel posts, maybe I can do one or two of those when I’m in Asia. God, I wish I were more of a fact guy so I could drop some esoteric fashion knowledge or tell people about why the trains in China are so efficient. I mean, I could just do some research, it’s not too late for me to acquire some more facts. Okay, focus, don’t think about next month. Maybe I can write about writer’s block? Lots of people suffer from writer’s block. I think it’s fundamentally an emotional thing, a feeling of stuckness that’s reminiscent of depression. My mind pinned down in one place like a taxidermied butterfly. How do I usually get out of it? I take Akko to the park, is that it? Sometimes I just give up and go to a wine bar. Sometimes I go to dinner with a friend and the conversation helps. Sometimes I just sit on my hands and stare at the blank page. Maybe I need to drink more alcohol. Maybe I need Vyvanse. Nope, there’s an amphetamine shortage, I don’t currently have the executive function to deal with that. Open TikTok? Okay, no. But do I need the $195 Theory cashmere sweater t-shirt that girl is wearing? No, okay, that’s not helping. Twitter? Haha, very funny. Why am I opening the Depop app? The Depop app is not going to solve writer’s block. Why is it that whenever I can’t write it feels like there’s nothing good to read? Okay, what about this Richard Siken poem. Okay, what about these Adrienne Rich love poems. Oh, this New Yorker article about how her political awakening. Oh, I should forward this essay about the contradictions of Simone Weil to my friend. Well, it’s nice to know there are people writing interesting things in the world, I just don’t happen to be one of them. I think I can’t write today because I’m too emotional. I have this thing where when I’m too busy processing I become inarticulate. But writing is what makes me feel better because it breaks down the feeling of stuckness.

It’s not so bad to be stuck sometimes though, right? Stuckness is what allows you to really appreciate the moments of motion. Rishi tells me he’s become a big fan of “the pause”—when you’re at an impasse, when you’re not sure what the next move is, just take a break. When I want someone to say more in a conversation, I just keep my mouth shut. When yoga feels frustrating and I’m not making any progress, I just take a couple of weeks off. So I can come back fresh. And am I afraid I’ll just stop, never go back? Sometimes. But not really because as long as you love something you’re going to keep throwing yourself at it. That’s my philosophy, anyway. Writer’s block is hard because writing consistently is one of the cornerstones of my life. It’s what allows me to parse my thoughts and emotions. If I don’t write, I literally can’t clean my apartment. The state of my fridge is a direct reflection of the state of my mind. I need to write in order to function. And yet, sometimes I sit down and nothing happens. The first day of fall is in 12 days. I always loved going back to school, the feeling of progression. I was an unruly kid, my parents and teachers were always trying to teach me discipline, order. As an adult, I’m the only one who is accountable for good habits, waking up at a reasonable time in the morning, taking my dog to the park. And sometimes I just feel so stagnant—so bogged down in uncertainty. No beautiful words to make everything better. No appetite for reading and how can I write when I’m not reading? And yet I’ve been feeling this way on and off for years and still somehow doing the thing. Being in it for the long haul means doubting your capacity for the work and bending yourself to it anyway.