Overcoming Writer's Block FOR MANY WRITERS THE WORST PART OF THE WRITING EXPERIENCE is the very beginning,

when they're sitting at the kitchen table staring at a blank sheet of paper or in front of that unblinking and perfectly empty computer monitor. "I have nothing to say," is the only thing that comes to mind. "I am XX years old and I have done nothing, discovered nothing, been nothing, and there are absolutely no thoughts in my head that anyone would ever want to read about." This is the Censor in your brain, your Self-Critic, and sometimes that Censor is bigger than you are. Who knows what causes the ugly Censor to be there a bad experience in third grade? something your mother said once during pottytraining? it doesn't matter. The Censor is there for all of us, building and rebuilding this thing called Writer's Block, one of the Censor's many self-limiting toys. It might be some comfort to know that even professional writers suffer from Writer's Block from time to time. Some of the greatest writers in literature Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway were tormented by momentary lapses in their ability to produce text although you wouldn't think it possible if you've ever tried to pick up War and Peace with one hand. American poet William Stafford offers this advice to poets who suffer from Writer's Block: "There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough." This sounds terrible at first. "What? I'm supposed to write junk? I need a good grade! I'm better than that!" No, Stafford is not encouraging writers to produce garbage. He is suggesting, however, that it's easy to take yourself too seriously, to think you're going to write a poem or an essay that is going to be the greatest poem or essay ever written, that you're going to formulate the greatest, loveliest, most intelligent statement ever made. So you sit there, thinking how unworthy you are, cursing the day you were born, wondering why you ever went to college, hating the very act of writing that has you so stymied. A writer has to let that go, forget about judgment. Go ahead and write drivel at first, as long as you write. Out of your nonsense and ramblings, however, believe that something good will come, some idea will catch fire right there on the page, there will be sparks, patterns will emerge. Be willing to throw stuff out. It's all right. Do you think Shakespeare didn't litter his kitchen floor with balled-up pieces of paper? One nice thing about the word-processor is that you're not wasting paper and trees; you're just exercising the delete key. But this is no time to worry about the environment. Fill that wastebasket with paper and trust that something will come of all this scribbling. It will. Carry with you a pocket-sized notebook in which you can scribble ideas for writing as they come to you. How often have you been stopped at a red-light and a great idea has come into your head? It's so wonderful that you know you'll remember it when you get home, but when you sit down at the table, pen in hand, all you remember is the fact that you had a good idea an hour ago. Part of the writing experience is learning that good ideas

do not always come to us when we need them. We must learn to catch ideas as they come to us, fortuitously, even as we're about to fall asleep at night. People who tell you that physical exercise is important for mental activity are telling the truth. If nothing's happening on the computer screen or paper, take a walk around the block. Hit the treadmill or tennis courts or drive to the gym. But take your notebook with you. Fresh blood will be flowing through your brain and jogging might just jog something loose in your head. It happens. Another trick is to start in the middle of your writing project. Avoid that problem of getting started by starting on a part of the project that interests you more and then come back to the introductory matter later. This sounds a bit like starting to earn your second million dollars before you've earned your first, but it's really not a bad idea in any case, because sometimes it's easier to say where you're going after you know where you've been. After all, your readers will never know you wrote the introduction last (another joy of word-processing technology!). One final maneuver around the old Writer's Block: talk over your paper with a friend, or just blab away into a tape recorder (even better). Play the tape back and write down what you hear in clusters of ideas or freewrite about them.

Freewriting
MANY WRITING INSTRUCTORS use a freewriting exercise at the beginning of each class. It's a way of getting the brain in gear, and it's an exercise you can do on your own, safe to try in your own home. (We provide an interactive page for this exercise, see below.) Write down a topic at the top of that empty page. It can be either a one-word topic like "Dentists," for example or a brief statement of the topic you've chosen or been given to write about. Set the clock for five to ten minutes and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and go at it. Write as fast as you can; the faster the better. You are not allowed to stop writing! If you can't think of anything to say, write down that you can't think of anything to say, something like: "I'm stuck but I'll think of something soon." Don't stop. Don't worry about transitions or connecting the ideas or paragraphing or subject-verb agreement or even commas. And form absolutely no judgment about what you write. Your Censor is on vacation. Your writing may take you in some really weird directions, but don't stop and never think to yourself, "Oh, this is dumb!" If you get off the subject, that's all right. Your divagation may end up somewhere wonderful. Just keep writing. Do not criticize yourself and do not cut or scratch out or revise in any way. Many instructors suggest that at the end of the timed period, you should write one sentence IN ALL CAPS that takes you back to where you started something to do with dentists. It's probably a good idea to read your freewriting out loud when you're done with it. Often the ear will pick up some pattern or neat idea that you hadn't noticed even as you wrote it. Read your freewriting to a friend or have your friend read it out to you. Your friend might think you're insane, but that's all right. Then it's time to spend just a couple of minutes going through the freewriting with an aim toward casual rewriting. The wordprocessor is a big advantage here. Delete the "I can't think of anything to say" lines and the pure nonsense. Are any ideas or patterns emerging? Don't give up on freewriting after one exercise. Many students think that it's boring or stupid at first and come to love it after a week or so of exercises. Freewriting is like any other kind of mental activity: you will get better at it. The first couple of times you try it, perhaps nothing will come of it. After a few efforts, though, the exercise will become liberating. Just as you would never start to play tennis or jog without stretching a bit first, you will never try to write again without doing a bit of freewriting first. Sometimes, even in the middle of an essay, when stuck for the next idea, you can do a bit of freewriting to get you going again.

Here's a five-minute example of free-writing on the subject of dentists written by an older student, Thruston Parry, who has given us permission to use his work:

DENTISTS
I hate going to the dentist. I'm always afraid that they're going to hurt me, and I'm not very good at pain, at tolerating pain, I mean. I remember the first time,w hen I was a kid, going to the dentists, it seemed I never went to the dentist when I was a kid until I had a toothache, that's my parents fault, isn't it, I guess. They should have taken better care of my teeth when I was little, and then I wouldn't have so much grief now with my teeth. But back then I would go to the dentists and he would have this godawful drill that would make this awful noise and it seemed like it always hurt. I remember there was this sign in his office that said PAINLESS DENTIST, UPSTAIRS, but there was no upstairs in his building. Some joke, huh? I can't think of anything to say, and I can't think of anything more to say. Oh, I wonder how come anyone in his right might mind would ever want to become a dentist, putting his fingers into other people's mouths all day, all that spit and blood and not there's the fear of getting AIDS from your clients that they have to wear those rubber gloves and I hate the feel of those things in my mouth, too, and the sound of that thing that draws the spit out of your mouth. I wonder why my folks didn't take me to the dentist BEFORE i had trouble. Probably because when they were growing up it was bad times and they didn't have any money for things like the dentist and it was just taken for granted that you were going to get cavieties and lose a lot of teeth before you were even an adult. I can't think of anything more to say. I can't think of anything more to say. all I know is that when I have kids, they're going to the dentist every six months whether they want to or not and maybe by then they'll have invented some way to absolutely prevent cavities and maybe there won't even be any dentists or if there are it'll just be to clean your teeth and make sure they're straight and pearly white and we won't worry about cavities and stuff like that that causes pain anymore. DENTISTS, MY ATTITUDE HAS CHANGED AS I GOT OLDER.

Looking back over this paragraph, do you see any ideas that might lend themselves toward an essay on dentists or at least the beginnings of one? Why would one want to become a dentist? or some other "unpleasant" line of medical work (even worse than dentistry)? How have attitudes toward going to the dentist changed over the years? Will better toothpastes, etc. eventually make dentists obsolete? How do dentists cope with the threat of AIDS? Is it a real threat?

Clustering
CLUSTERING IS SIMILAR to another process called Brainstorming. Clustering is something that you can do on your own or with friends or classmates to try to find inspiration in the connection between ideas. The process is similar to freewriting in that as you jot down ideas on a piece of paper or on the blackboard, you mustn't allow that ugly self-censor to intrude and say that your idea (or anyone else's) is dumb or useless. Write it down anyway. In Clustering, you jot down only words or very short phrases. Use different colored pens as ideas seem to suggest themselves in groups. Use printing or longhand script to suggest that ideas are main thoughts or supportive ideas. Don't bother to organize too neatly, though, because that can impede the flow of ideas. Don't cross anything out because you can't tell where an idea will lead you. When you get a few ideas written down, you can start to group them, using colored circles or whatever. Draw linking lines as connections suggest themselves. Below is a finished example of Clustering. It is printed here with permission of the aforementioned Thruston Parry. The assignment was to write a Cause and Effect Paper on the weather phenomenon known as El Nio. If you have a very fast modem connection or you're working in a computer lab, you can click HERE or on the image below for an animated sequence showing how the clustering might have happened. (A large image file -532 kb -- is involved, and we don't encourage you to download it without a fast connection; if the download stalls, you can return to this page by clicking on the RETURN link below the image, or you can click on STOP and then BACK.)

Points to Ponder:

Do you think you could write an essay based on the ideas clustered here? Can you draw additional links between concepts? Are there ideas listed above that you'd reject as irrelevant or too much to deal with? Can you think of some ideas (or a whole set of ideas) that should have been included but weren't? What about the causes of El Nio? Should they be included in this essay? Can you come up with a Thesis Statement that would be appropriate for an essay based on this clustering of ideas?

Outlining
IT MIGHT PROVE USEFUL to organize the ideas that suggest themselves during the freewriting and clustering exercises into a preliminary outline form. It is possible to write a paper without an outline, but it might suggest that your paper lacks organization if it proves impossible to write an outline that describes the thinking process behind your paper. Outlining never hurt; how helpful it is depends on what kind of thinker you are. At the least, a tentative outline can suggest areas in which your paper needs additional work or supporting details to bolster main ideas or, on the other hand, areas which have too much emphasis and need to be pruned down to avoid an imbalance. It might also help you to see how ideas are related and where connections or transitions are necessary between sections of your paper. Furthermore, the outline will help you visualize how ideas fit within the thesis statement that is taking shape in your mind. Remember that your outline is only a tentative skeleton to hang ideas on; limbs can be lopped off or added as the writing proceeds. Your instructor might require you to submit a formal outline for approval before you write your paper or to go along with your final draft. If that is so, this tentative outlining process will serve you well later on. a sample outline (from the MLA Handbook) of another proposed paper. The important thing to notice about it is how supporting details are arranged beneath more important ideas and the outline branches out (toward the right) as ideas become more supportive in nature. Logic demands that an "A" be followed by a "B." (If there is no "B," maybe there shouldn't be an "A," or "A" should be incorporated into the paper in some other way.)

Based on the MLA's sample, here is Thruston Parry's tentative outline for his proposed paper on the effects of El Nio:
I. Disastrous Weather Effects A. December Ice Storm in Maine 1. huge power outage 2. schools out 2 wks 3. jobs lost 4. cost in trees 5. replacing power poles, etc.

Rains in CA 1. mudslides 2. highways ripped apart 3. expensive homes in ocean 4. insurance costs C. Weather in FL 1. Killer tornadoes 2. freeze in March a. dead oranges b. costs of other fruits D. Other Disasters A. Flash floods in AZ B. ???? Not so bad effects Mild winter in New England Flowers in Death Valley Desert Skiing conditions in CO Mild winter in upper plains Long-term effects Power lines go underground Landscape 0. trees 1. ???? Really important effects Sense of powerlessness Fear of next winter

B.

Points to Ponder:

Are we closer to being able to write a paper than we were before we created the outline? Do any transitions between ideas suggest themselves? Is anything left out of our outline? Would you have organized the thoughts in the clustering exercise differently? Does the outline seem balanced or is part of it overwhelming the rest? There is no Thesis Statement yet. Does the outline help us resolve what that controlling idea might be? Before finally sitting down to write our paper on El Nio, we might check out what we can find out about it on the internet at a site like this one from the Environmental News Network -- being careful, of course, to give proper credit for any ideas we borrow and not to let the thoughts of others overshadow our own good ideas.

SENSE OF PURPOSE

This section ought to be read in conjunction with the section on Tone, as tone and purpose are very much related: one's tone is defined by why one is writing and vice versa.

IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW why you're writing. If your purpose in writing is to please your instructor or to get a better grade, that may not be enough. Many instructors devise strategies to persuade their students to write for a larger community publishing students' best work in a newsletter or online publication, asking students to send their papers to local newspapers, putting their best papers in a collection in the college library something that allows students to feel that more than one person, sitting alone at the kitchen table, is going to read this bit of writing. Knowing that there is more than one person to please, a public "out there," is a motivation in itself to do well, to communicate clearly. It will help establish, also, that consistent sense of tone that is so important to a paper's success. Beyond that feeling that there is an audience out there, waiting breathlessly for this paper you're working on, it helps to have a clear sense of what you're trying to do for this audience. Are you trying to entertain them? That is surely a lofty purpose: writing to lighten someone's spirits is not a project to be undertaken lightly. Is your paper a matter of selfexpression? Do you have opinions or feelings that you need to share with others? Are you trying to persuade others that you have a view of things that is clear-sighted, useful, and needs to be shared? Or that someone else's position is faulty, muddle-headed, or otherwise wrong? Are you trying to provide an exposition of facts or process or definition that others can take advantage of, or are you trying to persuade them of the rightness of a moral or ethical position? Do you want your audience to read your paper and then act, filled with new energy because of what you've told them? The objectivity, mood, and earnestness of your prose will be determined by this attitude or sense of purpose. The writing process is normally aided by a sense of pressure. This paper that we're working on is something that has to be written not just because we must please our writing instructors or because we need a good grade in this course (those pressures have their own sense of emergency) but because there is information or a point of view that we

need to share with the reader. Karl Schnapp, an English professor at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut, calls this sense of pressure exigence.

Exigence consists of the circumstances that necessitate communication. For example, if you fall down the cellar stairs and lie at the bottom screaming for help, then exigence is easy to understand: you have fallen, and you can't get up. Those are "the circumstances that necessitate communication." Here is another example. You buy your Aunt Louise a scanner for her birthday so she can monitor all the emergency and police radio activity in her neighborhood, but she says the programming directions are too complicated and she gives the scanner back to you. When you try to program it for Auntie, you discover she's right. So you write the manufacturer to complain about their programming instructions. Those are "the circumstances that necessitate communication." In a word, exigence is a problem, a defect, a challenge out there in the real world that compels people to communicate. Sometimes these problems are economic: the shortage of financial aid for students, the lack of money for necessities of life, the unwise manner in which tax dollars are spent by our government. Other times the defects are political: bickering over a recycling program among factions on the city council, a quarrel between members of a union over whether or not to strike. Sometimes the challenges are social: the deportation to immigrants, the treatment of people with racial, ethnic, or physical differences. Sometimes the flaws are personal: the need to vent anger about a casual remark that was taken as an insult, the desire to establish or maintain friendly ties with acquaintances or co-workers or family (please note that not all exigences are negative; in reality, many are positive), the need to relieve feelings of pain caused by the breakdown of a long-term relationship. In all these cases (and many more in our everyday lives), circumstances exist that call out for us to communicate with others. Understanding exigence is essential because without it we cannot effectively determine purpose.
1998

(used with Professor Schnapp's permission)

The pressure to write is determined by the relationship between you as writer and the audience you're trying to reach and affect. Let's examine two essay beginnings with an eye toward determining the writer's purpose and how that sense of purpose establishes tone and word choice. Let's say that for a course in Art Appreciation we have to write (there's a bit of pressure right there!) a brief analysis of a famous painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1558; Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm; Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). [Clicking on the image below will call up a larger version of the same painting 179 kb, not recommended with slow connections.] As you read the beginnings, think about the relationship between writer and audience and how this might have influenced how the writer wrote as he or she did.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus [First Version] The first thing that grabbed my eye when I checked out Bruegel's painting was the red jacket worn by the guy in the foreground. Except for the splotchy sun in the sky, it's really the only bit of color in the whole thing, and I really like bright, warm colors like that. Then I noticed the fact that this guy's looking straight ahead at the horse's rear end in front of his plow. "Whoa, Nelly!" I thought to myself. What a weird thing to put in the middle of a pretty painting! It wasn't until later that I noticed a pair of legs sticking out of the ocean down in the lower right-hand corner of the painting. Somebody's drowning. Of course, none of the three guys in the painting (the plowman, the shepherd, and the fisherman) are paying much attention to it either; in fact, they're pretty much oblivious to what's going on in the

water. Even the boat is headed in the wrong direction, and no one seems to give a darn or is going to save whoever belongs to those legs splashing into the water. . . .

Our first version of this first essay's beginning is casual, to say the least. Some of the language, the choice of words, would be typical of friends standing in front of a painting at the museum, remarking in an off-handed way some of its more obvious characteristics. Words and phrases such as "guy," "pretty much," "horse's rear end," "weird thing," "give a darn," "pretty," and, of course, "Whoa, Nelly!" would be inappropriate in formal academic discourse. It's not so much that those words are wrong, exactly, just that they are neither precise nor helpful in our understanding of how the painting registers its effects on the viewer. In addition, the analysis of the painting is done entirely from the viewpoint of the first-person singular, "I." Again, that's not exactly wrong, but the reader is impressed by the fact that these impressions could be entirely those of the eccentric individual writing, not that these are impressions that ought to be shared by others. The reader is not aware of any need the writer might have to make us feel or know something about this painting. The essay excerpt below is taken from a paper by Bea Wildred, who gives us her gracious permission to use this text. Her more objective, academically appropriate essay begins this way:
Bea Wildred Introduction to Art Professor Allegre Capital Community College 14 April 1998 An Analysis of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus [Second Version]

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, impresses the viewer first with the softness of sunshine and the bucolic pleasures of the countryside. The everyday pursuits of the three common men pictured the plowman, the shepherd, and the fisherman are being carried out in earnest, but with apparent ease and even pleasure. The shepherd lifts his face to the sky, seemingly unconcerned that his sheep are grazing perilously close to the seacliff's edge; the other two are a bit more intent on their work. The details of the foreground the way the plowman's feet tread upon the neatly folded soil behind the plow blend toward the vague but powerful treatment of the background's mysteries: the nearly obscured and whitened mountains, the majestic (if

somewhat cloudy) city along the far shore, and the ruined castle in the sea with its cave-like entry. The glow of the setting sun (its golden light nearly palpable in the sky) is mirrored by a splash of light in the far sea, but its main effect is in the foreground, the illumination of the commonplace activities of the plowman and the shepherd. The most vivid color in the painting is the reddish orange of the plowman's shirt, juxtaposed as it is to the natural earth tones of horse and dirt surrounding it. Even the shepherd's shadow has an ephemeral quality as the light hits him and his plow nearly horizontally. Whatever energy exists in the painting is moving toward the left side; the plowman, face downward, plods in that direction, as does his horse (whose backside also indecorously confronts the viewer). They move downward and to the left, toward the delicate tracery (like a Chinese screen) of the large tree on the left edge. All of this occurs to the viewer before the central event of the painting (as announced in the painting's title) reveals itself to his attention: the splash of a pair of legs as the fallen Icarus plunges into the sea. In the lower right-hand corner of the painting, the painfully splayed legs, their delicate pinkness, are all that we see of the fallen mythological figure. They are caught at that precise instant that this symbol of human pride or hubris is about to disappear forever from the world's attention (ironically, of course, in a world where no one is paying attention). We are the only ones who will ever know. All of the energies of the painting lead away from this disturbing and important event: the plowman and shepherd, oblivious, go about their business, as does the fully-rigged boat (also moving toward the left), sailing away from the fallen figure. . . .

Points to Ponder:

Which essay would you find more helpful in your understanding of the painting's effects? Can you relate this to the writer's apparent sense of purpose in each case? There is no "I" in the second version of the essay's beginning. Do you miss that personal element or does the essay work better without it? Does the second version ever come too close to being stuffy? The writer of the second version seems to have a larger vocabulary than the writer of the first version. Words such as "bucolic," "ephemeral," "palpable," "juxtapose," "ironically," "backside," and "energies" come to mind. Did you have to look up any of those words? What impression does that vocabulary have on you as reader? Is there already a thesis statement in this essay or is one about to suggest itself? Can you say what it would be? The author of this piece is neither an artist nor a critic and so lacks some of the sophistication that other student-writers (art majors, say) might have. What other details in the painting or its composition would you select to write about? If you'd like to experiment with this sense of purpose, try writing on a piece of art work of your own choosing. Visit the [Link] Museum of Art and choose a painting that appeals to you. Then, using the Untimed Exercise Sheet (which will open in its own window), write one paragraph that sounds as if you're talking over the painting with a close friend and then another paragraph that sounds as though you're trying to help a serious group of readers in the general public understand what's going on in the painting. (If you want to save your writing, you'll have to copy and paste the text into a word-processing document.)