Tenderness On the Block
No doubt you've seen those Scientology booths in the subway with the cheery automatons offering a "Free Stress Test." Over on the red-covered folding table, behind the two dozen copies of Dianetics, there's this little machine with an important-looking gauge on it, and they give you a little electrodey thing to hold onto and the gauge tells you about your stress levels. Then, presumably, the Scientologist administering the test tells you that the official-looking gauge says you are extremely blocked, and reading this wonderful book will help you to unblock.
I'm not sure if this is how it's done anymore, but a friend told me that the Scientology stress machines were at one point nothing more than simple voltmeters, so your "blockage level" was actually just a measure of how well your body functioned as a conductor. So a fun way to freak out the Scientologists would be to lick your palms before you hold onto the official-looking electrodey things, because wet things, as we all know, conduct better than dry things, and the machine would then register an unusually high conductivity, therefore a low blockage, therefore L. Ron could take a couple of lessons from YOU. (Yeah, I got yer blockage right here, buddy.)
Anyway, this is a very long way of introducing a very simple idea. Blocked is exactly how I feel right now. I feel as though the ideas I want to articulate are on the other side of a thick wall, and I can't really dig into them. The approximately sixteen thousand writing books on the reference shelf in my office nook (On Writing by Stephen King and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury being the only two that imparted anything useful at all) tell tale after tale of great authors who hit the wall, get over it, and go on to write, like, The Great Gatsby.
(Incidentally, Gatsby is always my touchstone for great literature, and not just because it's a great book, which it is. I cite it constantly because of that scene in John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire in which Lilly Berry declares that if you don't think you can write a book as good as Gatsby then you'll never get started. I know exactly how she feels. It's a small comfort to imagine that Irving was using Lilly as a mouthpiece for himself when he wrote that. It does, after all, take him three years to finish a book.)
(And I'm pretty sure Fitzgerald was too busy drinking and carousing and having dysfunctional relationships to let something so provincial as writer's block get him down, so Gatsby probably isn't the example I'm looking for. But you get what I mean.)
If only unblocking were really as simple as licking my palms or joining a cult. Unfortunately, the only thing to do is ride it out and try not to be overly negative about it. The latter is actually harder than the former.
I'm not sure if this is how it's done anymore, but a friend told me that the Scientology stress machines were at one point nothing more than simple voltmeters, so your "blockage level" was actually just a measure of how well your body functioned as a conductor. So a fun way to freak out the Scientologists would be to lick your palms before you hold onto the official-looking electrodey things, because wet things, as we all know, conduct better than dry things, and the machine would then register an unusually high conductivity, therefore a low blockage, therefore L. Ron could take a couple of lessons from YOU. (Yeah, I got yer blockage right here, buddy.)
Anyway, this is a very long way of introducing a very simple idea. Blocked is exactly how I feel right now. I feel as though the ideas I want to articulate are on the other side of a thick wall, and I can't really dig into them. The approximately sixteen thousand writing books on the reference shelf in my office nook (On Writing by Stephen King and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury being the only two that imparted anything useful at all) tell tale after tale of great authors who hit the wall, get over it, and go on to write, like, The Great Gatsby.
(Incidentally, Gatsby is always my touchstone for great literature, and not just because it's a great book, which it is. I cite it constantly because of that scene in John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire in which Lilly Berry declares that if you don't think you can write a book as good as Gatsby then you'll never get started. I know exactly how she feels. It's a small comfort to imagine that Irving was using Lilly as a mouthpiece for himself when he wrote that. It does, after all, take him three years to finish a book.)
(And I'm pretty sure Fitzgerald was too busy drinking and carousing and having dysfunctional relationships to let something so provincial as writer's block get him down, so Gatsby probably isn't the example I'm looking for. But you get what I mean.)
If only unblocking were really as simple as licking my palms or joining a cult. Unfortunately, the only thing to do is ride it out and try not to be overly negative about it. The latter is actually harder than the former.
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