I just googled Writer’s Block.
Along with all the mental symptoms, I also suffer from a full range of physical symptoms, because the form of Writer’s Block I get always comes with physical symptoms, as if the mental symptoms weren’t bad or extreme enough.
First the mental: Every sentence I write sucks. Every sentence I write sounds stupid. Sentences grind to a halt. There is no flow. Today I looked at something I wrote yesterday and it made absolutely no sense. I was writing in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language.
For a couple of weeks before the block went into full throttle, and I was writing at a steady pace, my hands began to hurt; my arms to ache. My fingers swelled. I couldn’t get my aquamarine ring on. My neck often hurts, so I ignored that symptom. And then, something I’ve never experienced before, the feeling that some monster’s hands were grabbing me by the waist digging strong fingers in the kidney area; any moment I expected to be lifted off the ground and thrown—where else—out the window.
I’ve read that Graham Greene wrote 300 words every day in fountain pen. Did he write his allowed amount, then start counting the words, perhaps smudging them with his cigarette stained finger? I’ll never know. Of course he didn’t have Internet to distract him. Just opium, nicotine and prostitutes.
Last Sunday, day two of the block, I bought another copy of Travels with my Aunt, (not one of his masterpieces, but a fabulous book and movie) because I can’t find my old copy and I’m going to start reading it three hundred words at a time. Maybe this will help with my writer’s block. Maybe by the time I start doing this exercise, my block will be over.
The New Agers have it right when they say, positive affirmations only. Here are some of mine:
I am ready to continue writing Man Woman Dog.
Man Woman Dog flows freely.
This is the best draft ever.
Something good will come of this!
And finally, most pitifully: You will live through this.
I also wonder if there is some correlation between the fact that my main character, who when the book opens, has not written or drawn anything in two years (I’m on day six and ready to off myself!) has gotten over his writer’s/illustration block and is happily working again in New York, while I’m sitting on my ergonomic stool in West LA eating my guts out? Does somebody always have to be suffering in my small, cold little universe? The real one I live in or the imaginary one I write in?
D.W. Winnocott, the great British psychoanalyst, cured Samuel Beckett of his writing block. But I’m not Samuel Beckett. My shrink’s on holiday, and thinking one has the same problems as a genius is not only delusional, it’s highly depressing as well.
However, I was thinking of taking my laptop over to the psychoanalytic society that’s a few blocks away and sitting there at one of their long cool tables, something I have done in the past, though my library membership has expired by now. And it will cost me a hundred bucks to renew, provided I can talk them into letting me write there, only the shrinks are supposed to use the tables, but last time I asked, they were very kind. I don’t feel capable of talking anybody into doing anything at the present moment. All I can do is sit here and stare.
FYI: if you have gotten this far, you have read twice as many words plus as Graham Greene wrote every day in fountain pen in his long, sexy, smoky life as a genius.
Me, I’ve written nothing whatsoever today except this. And this doesn’t count.
by 
