Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Pains of putting pen to paper; Not all writers are stricken with Flaubertism
National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
BYLINE: Robert Fulford, National Post

Fulford includes Elmore in his discussion of the agonies of writing and the dreaded writer’s block.

Flaubert blamed his troubles on his perfectionist lust for excellence. He made it appear that intense authorial distress is the inevitable partner of good writing. Ever since, generations of authors have believed that what they do is unthinkably arduous. There’s no reason to doubt Flaubert’s agonies, but it seems likely that by describing them he helped insert self-indulgence and self-pity into the emotional toolkits of ambitious scribes.

Mark Twain was blocked for years while writing Huckleberry Finn. Joseph Mitchell, once one of the stars at The New Yorker, had a persistent block that kept him out of print for the last 32 years of his life. (Sometimes he could be heard to sigh, but he never complained.) Joseph Conrad, prolific as he was, sometimes came to a dead halt, unable to scratch even a few words on paper: “It takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth.”

Even journalists suffer from writer’s block. My own experience with it involved (just as in the legends) much staring endlessly at a blank page. Finally I learned a trick: Don’t begin at the beginning. Instead, start with some other part of what needs to be said, if possible the easiest part. Write that, and you’ve started. It may turn out to be the ending, it may be the middle or it may not even appear in the finished work. No matter. By then the work has begun. The screen is no longer blank.

Still, Elmore Leonard lingers in my mind. “I don’t believe in writer’s block,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.” If he were not one of the great narrative stylists of his time we could dismiss him as an uncaring philistine; as it, his view has to be taken seriously.