Being Blocked

Posted by Colin Harvey Jun 20, 2009

There are two words that strike fear into almost every writer's heart: Writer's Block.

The inability to create, to deliver a completed ms. on time is literally the equivalent of a disability. If you couldn't walk to your job, or couldn't see your keyboard, wouldn't you be considered disabled?

I was blocked for nineteen years after attending a workshop that --with hindsight-- I was too young to cope with. After the workshop I knew that there were things I didn't know, but didn't know how to learn them. Didn't even know what questions to ask, or who to ask them of.

These were pre-internet days; growing up in rural Devon, then moving around, it was years before I had a stable enough environment to turn my attention back to questions such as "What is plot? Character arc?" For years, I was unable to finish a story - in fact, after a couple of years of being blocked, I no longer even started them. What was the point in starting a new piece when I had a half-dozen unfinished ones?

For months at a time, I wouldn't even be able to think of writing. But every couple of years, I would awake with an image in my mind that I yearned to be able to put on paper,so I'd start another one - and duly run into a mental brick wall, be it a few hundred words in, or close to the end.

For nineteen years I was a writer unable to write. Until one day in 1997, the people in the office where I worked were given bad news. More on that next time.