Blocked? Sort out your files. Buy some pens.

If you’re not a writer, why do you have so many pens?

Writers I know often talk about experiencing block—a concept I’m not sure I fully endorse. But when I worked in hospice, the governing philosophy was that the patient was the expert on pain, and reports of pain were never to be questioned. Likewise, the writer is the expert on this very particular type of pain—the anguish of not being able to produce. It would be insensitive and maybe even ableist, in some cases, to suggest it’s not happening.

Still, I go through dry spells, some of them long ones, so even if I’m not using the same nomenclature, I’m facing the same issue. And it feels awful—whether a busy worklife is keeping me from the page, or whether I’m in front of the screen and can’t think of a thing to put on it.

I tend to think that if I sit down long enough and manipulate the tools—the pen or the keyboard—the writing will come. This philosophy has never failed me. Sometimes the stupidest things scritch out of my pencil—embarrassing things, things I can’t obliterate quickly enough—but if I keep at it, there will be the glint of something: a nugget, a gem. And that something can become the basis of something bigger, or it can be its own thing.

If a million monkeys on keyboards for an infinite amount of time can produce King Lear, this simian surely has a couplet in her. And a couplet is half a quatrain, and one-seventh of a sonnet. Just sitting and working will yield something every time, and even if it’s awful, it’s not … nothing. That’s a start.

Sometimes I tease myself back toward creativity by doing the butt-tinglingly dull administrative work that accompanies the creative life. Just having my hands on my poetry or fiction or nonfiction sort of gives me the itch to do something new.

If you can’t write, you might try this trick. Here are some of the administrative things you can turn your attention to while you wait for ideas:

·      Clean up your files. My laptop files are a mess. Naming is inconsistent; all genres are jumbled together; published stuff looks the same as unpublished. Imposing order on electronic files sometimes has the effect of clearing mental clutter (while reminding us of what we’re capable of).

·      Do select revision work. I know I’m bad at titles, and sometimes I slap a label-type title on top of a poem, with the idea that I’ll return later and make it something brilliant. That poem you labeled “Water” may have a new life as, say, “What Wetness the Stream Can Offer” or some such thing. It may even be more publishable. In lieu of titles, you might comb through your linebreaks or your starts and stops, just to see what kind of improvements you can make.

·      Research markets. There are a lot of good markets out there; see where your favorite writers are publishing, and check out those journals that are new to you. Make notes about submission windows, policies, fees, and the like.

·      Prepare submission packets. Determine what poems or flashes work well together and group them accordingly. Combine them into one file for submission. Do this as you research new markets—or after.

·      Go back-to-school shopping. Hit the office supply store and buy some notebooks, pens, printer paper, tape, toner—anything you need to make the magic happen. This is psychologically reassuring. If you’re not a writer, why do you have all of those pens?

·      Look into grants and residencies. Creative visualization is powerful, no matter one’s field. You can picture yourself at work on your writing in a residency environment, or you can imagine what you would do with the benison of some extra cash. Spend some time looking up these sorts of opportunities, and let your imagination fly.

·      Work on tracking old submissions. Maybe you never heard back from a specific journal, or maybe your records are a bit of a mess. Follow up; organize. Make sure you’re ready if you need to make an acknowledgements page in the future.

·      Put a new manuscript together. You might be far from having a manuscript that’s ready to send out, but if you read your unattached work, or print it out and move it around, you can start to see patterns and themes; what’s more, you can start to see gaps—places where some new creative effort could do some good.

When I tackle the mindless paper-shuffling tasks, what inevitably happens is that I get very sick of them—and I can’t wait to get back to the pure act of writing. Sometimes I use my energy on a different genre to help ease myself back into the flow, and sometimes I assign myself a project or a specific challenge, so that the intellectual aspects of writing temporarily take precedence over what for me is a spiritual practice.

I’ve mentioned it here before, but I have a daily contemplative project that contains a writing component—daily haiku-length poems on gun deaths. Some days I don’t write anything else, but this project is roughly equivalent to turning over the engine on that sports car under a tarp in the garage. You have to move the oil from the pan; you have to crank up the battery. Otherwise, it may not be drivable in the future without serious work.

As a bonus, I never have to say I have writer’s block. I write every day, even when it’s vexing and feels more like math. A journal, as discussed yesterday, can serve the same purpose.

If something has taken you away from writing, I hope you find your way back, and I hope you find your break restorative. Sometimes we quit writing temporarily because we’re gathering instead of producing. Thinking is part of the writing process, even when we’re not spitting out words.

Pretty in Black and White

            I spent much of today taping poems to the walls of my little office. It’s the kind of thing that you do when you’re in possession of two chief requirements: a book manuscript that is going nowhere and at least four blank walls painted a grim, institutional hue.

            My book manuscript has been making the rounds for a while now without catching an editor’s eye, with one exception. I recently switched some things around and added some new work, to good effect—I’m currently a finalist in a book contest with the slightly revised version.

            The way I see it, if a few small additions and deletions of poems can make me a finalist, well, then overhauling that sucker will surely result in a book. And a prize. Great reviews. A National Book Award or Pulitzer or two ....

            But I digress. The manuscript is older than my artistic vision, and it’s time for more of the sorts of changes that seemed to help it a bit in the contest I mentioned. And just like Andie (the Mollie Ringwald character) in Pretty in Pink, you need to do something that’s just right for you with the material you have, even if it requires getting out the seam ripper and the pinking shears and going to town on the original.

            (I’m sorry. I can’t let the reference to the Pretty in Pink dress go by without mentioning how incredibly ugly Andie’s finished product actually was—like a cross between a mother-of-the-bride dress and a toilet paper roll. It is, quite simply, one of the worst dresses I have ever seen. One of the benefits of blogging is that you may bring everything to a grinding halt so that you can offer a strong opinion about a twenty-nine-year-old movie.)

            Allow me to return to my manuscript, which is now thoroughly deconstructed and lining every inch of the walls of a small office. I even maximized space by taping poems into a bookcase, on sides, back, bottom, and underside of each visible shelf.

            The result of my effort is that I can sit in my chair and steeple my fingers under my chin like a don—love poems to the left of me, mom poems to the right, body poems behind me, uncategorized work out in front. The ceiling is bare. I’m not out of poems; I just don’t have a ladder to put them there, much as I’d like to lie on the floor and mentally rearrange them.

            In a previous post, I recommended poetry projects—that is, I recommended that busy writers have an ongoing topic or exercise so that they can cut out the time they might otherwise spend wondering what to write about. While this plan is effective for time saving, and is artistically energizing, my mess of a manuscript reveals a flaw in the idea. The reason my poems won’t fall into a tidy line is that when I look at them, I don’t see a book—I see a dozen chapbooks and a bunch of strays.

            I suspect that the problem isn’t the poems. After all, they spring from the same consciousness; they reveal my idiosyncratic rhetoric and lineation and imagery and form. I feel as though one could pick any two from the walls or the remaining stack (ceiling material!) and recognize that the same woman wrote them. (That could also be the problem—that woman, bless her heart, may not be any good! But that’s an issue for another day.) The poems work together, and each one shores up the efforts of the others.

            When it comes time to make a book, I realize that I may be locked within a project-driven mindset, and I have a hard time sticking several sets of poems together. While I appreciate my imagination—quirky and flexible and vivid—in the composition of the poems, my vision totally fails when I try to use it to find a path through my own book.

            The imagination that is willing to get into the kind of trouble that yields a poem is lodged in a mind that struggles to bring order from chaos. I am not the first poet to feel flummoxed by the organizational aspect of the publishing task. And when I look across my messy home desk, positioned in a chaotic room of a disorganized house, this is especially clear.

            This is really just a long way of inviting you to my office. Tucked away in a deserted corner of an academic building, it’s a good place to sit and think. And if you have a moment, could you eyeball the poems all around you, maybe shift a few from one wall to another?

            There’s a roll of tape in the drawer. Please turn out the lights when you leave.