Getting Out of the Way of Your Own Writing

February 2023

There is a romantic tradition predominant in the West that favours seeing the artist (not just writers but artists of all types) as this:

It is a picture of the solitary artist, stripped down to the grimmest self, tearing art out in the way a harakiri warrior rips out his own entrails. The author in this paradigm is divided within himself, tormented and always trying to dodge the oncoming train of writer’s block. The unbearable weight of dragging art out of him or herself takes its toll and thus we have the tradition in the West of writers and heavy drinking. Examples are legion: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Twain, Steinbeck, Poe, Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, John Cleever, Hunter Thompson, Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas who literally drank himself to death in one sitting. 

“Write while you’re drunk,” Hemingway famously said, “Edit sober.”

But to look at art in this way is to disconnect the artist from the creative process itself. The desired result is seen as out beyond the self and only under unusual circumstances (as with the help of a bottle) do the two come into happy coalition. It is my contention that the very first step into writer’s block is this disconnection of the writer from the field of creativity, what we sometimes call "the flow." It is out at this distance, that the Hemmingway cycle kicks in.

"Edit sober." But, out here, we are easy prey for a type of creative schizophrenia. We compare ourselves and our work to others. We even compare ourselves to ourselves: to how we have sounded before, how we ought to sound. We encounter the dreaded block because we start reaching for an outfit instead of settling into our naked selves. 

 

There is a different way to view the creative process, however, a better paradigm:

 “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “mensch” in a higher sense – he is “collective man” – one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.”  

Carl Jung wrote this many decades ago, but it is an approach that goes a long way to dispelling the image of the tortured artist. If the creation of art is not all up to you and your “creativity,” then a huge burden is lifted off your shoulders. On this model, if you’re facing writer’s block, you’re simply standing in your own shadow. What you have to do is to step around, face the sun and not block it. 

 

I think that through the ages musicians have recognised this model of creativity better than their literary counterparts. 

Beethoven saw the role of the artist as “disseminating divine rays among mankind.”

Brahms claimed that he received his art in a flow direct from God. 

Elgar wrote the main theme for his cello concerto on a napkin after waking up from surgery.

Paul McCartney claims he dreamed the melody for “Yesterday,” the most recorded song in history, and it took him a while to allow himself to claim it.

James Taylor describes songwriting as a “Mysterious and uncontrolled process.”  “I don’t know much about God,” he says, “But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do.”

So, if this underbelly of what James Joyce called “The uncreated conscience of my race," is available to all and particularly to the artist, the question becomes: how do we go about connecting ourselves to it?

First of all we have to see that we are not separate from it but are an integral part of the field itself. Everything we need to write down or slap on a canvas or put into song is already contained within us. I think the key here is listening, deep listening.

Of course, in our culture we are bombarded with sense stimuli and so we have learned to surface-listen, just as we surface see and surface evaluate. What is lacking is stillness, not something our culture favours. 

Creating art is not invention, but reflection. You have to let go of the reins, and, when things go quiet, listen, and then listen even harder. It is not a lack of skill that is missing in the sufferer of writer’s block. It is the art of listening. When you open yourself and listen, you are becoming the kind of channel that Jung is talking about.

Let me cite a couple of trivial examples of recent writers who have done this (even without realising it) :  

 

When JK Rowling was sitting in that dingy little café in Edinburgh Scotland writing down what must have seemed at the time this whacky story of muggles and wizards, she had no notion at all of what this story was going to amount to. The key was that she was following what arose spontaneously out of her.  What she was channeling was “the uncreated conscience” of her race.

Wonder and magic are so innately human, that you can only suppress it for so long. JK Rowling sitting in her Edinburgh café was willy nilly tapping into this Vesuvius of feeling; what she was countering was the long-held Christian fear of the pagan.  But who would have thought? She wouldn’t have thought it, when Harry Potter was getting rejection after rejection from publishers. Who would have thought that this silly story about wizards and speaking hats and flying cars would go on to sell 450 million copies in 73 languages? 

And then there's The Da Vinci Code. In 2000 Dan Brown published a book entitled “Angels and Demons,” which introduced the protagonist- crime-solver Robert Langdon. Brown was unknown at the time and the book sold poorly, which was disappointing to the publisher and presumably to Dan Brown himself. 

At this point, Dan Brown could have given up. But he didn’t. Three years later he went on to publish The Da Vinci code. It was very similar to its predecessor in structure, in writing style. The protagonist is the same Robert Langdon solving a similar kind of intrigue in the same impossibly short time. What’s the difference? The difference can be summed up in two words “Sacred Feminine,” another area (though not unrelated) that the church throughout the ages has systematically repressed.  

Dan Brown's expectations were low.  But little did he know: The Da Vinci Code became a best seller in the first week and has gone on to become one of the best selling books of all time, selling 81 million copies in 44 languages. 

So, Art from the Heart, deep listening, re-connecting yourself to a field of energy and creativity that you are already a part of. This is certainly a much more helpful paradigm than the one of the solitary individual in a pre-set and unforgiving universe pulling meaning and art out of a machine encased within the cage of the skull.

The model of the tortured writer needs to shift. You can lay down your arms, let the battle cease. It is not up to you and your creativity. The muse is your friend, but she's not a person who takes hissy fits and deserts you. Being tied to your own solitary brain is the equivalent to being tied to an Iphone (much like my teenage daughter is) but without service. There is no use in shaking the phone when it isn’t receiving service, no more does shaking yourself when you can’t think of what to write. Just wait a while, listen deeply until you are connected again. More precisely, get out of the way of yourself (or again as my teenage daughter would put it – get over yourself!) 

“You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, remain still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Kafka