The perfect conditions for a creative block

#Blocktober continues

Welcome to the 101st issue of Subtle Maneuvers and part two of #blocktober, my three-part series on creative blocks. Last time, I mentioned that much of my own writing life has been defined by blocks. This time, to try to understand what causes this “awful jackass feeling,” I thought I would briefly describe my most stuck periods. I think you’ll pick up on some themes.

2002–05

After graduating from college, I decided that I wanted to write fiction—a novel!—and my plan was to live somewhere cheap, get an undemanding day job, and write in the mornings before work. I achieved parts one and two, with a library job and a little apartment in Nashville, and over the next three years I wrote . . . nothing (and felt terrible about it).

This block was finally resolved when a family friend suggested I attend a summer program on the publishing industry, in New York; through that I managed to get a job at a small architecture magazine, where I was forced to generate a substantial amount of writing on deadline. Saved by deadlines!

2013–16

Fast forward a decade and I’ve managed to publish my first book. After several years writing magazine stories that I wasn’t always so enthusiastic about—and working on the book in my spare time—I thought this was my big moment. The book opened up doors, gave me a higher profile. And I had switched to a part-time job, so I had much more bandwidth available. Now I’d show everyone what I was really capable of!

Instead, I spent a solid three years repeating the same cycle: I’d come up with a new book idea, get really excited about it, do a bunch of research, and start trying to write a proposal—only to lose confidence in the idea, feel that I could not possibly write an entire book on this subject, avoid working on it, and finally drift toward a different idea, the idea, for sure this time . . . and do it all over again.

This miserable cycle was finally broken when my publisher asked if I’d be interested in doing an e-book mini-sequel to Daily Rituals—dear god, yes!—which eventually grew into a full-fledged sequel published in 2019.

2020–22

After the second Daily Rituals book came out, in February 2019, I was determined not to repeat what had happened after the first book. I was going to settle on an idea—it didn’t have to be perfect—write and sell a proposal, get a deadline, and get back to work.

This worked—sort of. I returned to one of the earlier ideas I had abandoned, wrote an outline and a sample chapter, sold the book, got a deadline, and buckled down to work—only to become increasingly mired in a whole new species of block: I had a plan, and I was doing the work, but somehow everything I was writing was just bad. Lifeless, dull. Worse, it felt phony, like I was impersonating a different writer.

This block was finally solved by basically abandoning my whole original plan for the book, coming up with a looser, more improvisatory approach—and getting a nine-month deadline extension from my publisher in order to execute this new version. And that’s what I’m doing right now! It’s due February 1st.

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So—What are the perfect conditions for a block?

Here are six patterns of behavior that can land you in trouble (plus an additional possibility to keep in mind):