The Good News About Writer's Block

April may be the cruelest month for poets, but for novelists, the toughest month on the calendar is November, when National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as we writers awkwardly but affectionately call it, takes place. During November, writers with nothing better to do sign up to produce a 50,000 word (or more) novel in 30 days (or less). The event is misnamed for two and a half reasons:

1) No one, not Stephen King, not Nora Roberts, not even James Patterson, the world’s most prolific collaborator, can produce a novel in 30 days.

2) For many years now, this has been an international event. However the organizers—quite wisely in my opinion--resist renaming it to InNaNoWriMo.

1/2) 50,000 words do not a novel make. In the fantasy genre, they don’t even make half a novel.   

On Monday evening this week, the library hosted an information evening for local writers eager to take up the November challenge. I was reluctant to join in the creative frenzy, but forced myself to attend the meeting and listened carefully  to the lecture on freefall writing in the hope of shattering my writer’s block, which has reached a severity level that could justifiably be characterized as writer’s constipation since I ‘m not even producing crap, let alone a decent story.

Freefall writing turns out to be stream-of-consciousness writing, an excellent undertaking for those desiring to produce brilliant descriptive prose. However, brilliant descriptive prose does not a story make, unless you happen to be James Joyce. At my end of the spectrum, the end populated by impatient readers who skip over all descriptions, brilliant or otherwise, in pursuit of plot, such passages invariably induce drowsiness. Attempting to write one could put me in very real danger of lapsing into a coma.

I slumped home after the meeting in state of hopeless dejection that lasted until this morning, when, while indulging in that first and most glorious hit of caffeine and perusing other people’s blogs, I discovered how narrowly I had escaped disaster on Monday night.

The Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has recently completed a study decisively linking creativity and mental illness. Now everyone intuitively knows that the more creative a person is, the crazier that person is, and there have been any number of scientific investigations into this linkage. But two factors make the Swedish study stand out from the psychiatric herd:

1) the size of the sample (1.2 million patients)

2) the period covered by the study (forty years)

For the first time, scientists were able to perform reliable statistical analysis on the severity of insanity based on type of creativity, and this analysis has led to one inescapable and chilling conclusion.

To the layman, Vincent van Gogh was the poster-boy for artistic nuttiness, mostly based on that disgusting ear stunt. This type of flamboyance has created the impression that visual artists are the insane cream of the creative crop. But in fact, they are merely the most visible. Statistically, writers are the batshit bad boys of the gifted community. (I can almost hear my friends muttering, “Well hell. I could have told her that.”)  Writing is, quite literally, an insanely risky undertaking. We authors have the highest rates of schizophrenia, depression, anxiety syndrome and substance abuse, not to mention that we are almost twice as likely to commit suicide.

So next month, while those writers I met on Monday night are hunched over their keyboards, risking madness in pursuit of the great Canadian novel, my sanity will be absolutely secure because I have writer’s block.

Whew! That was a close one.

It’s Not Over While the Thin Lady Sings

I came home yesterday afternoon and found a bursting-with-pride email from friend Wen containing a Youtube link to this:

 

 When I clicked on it, I felt pretty damn proud myself.

I got my first guitar at 17. Within a week, I had mastered three major chords and written my first song. I can’t remember it now, but since one of my three chords was A minor, it was probably some sort of angsty adolescent lament about unrequited love, an emotional state that plagued my teenage years due to the presence in my science class of a boy who could have modeled Calvin Klein underwear, if they’d had those kind of ads back then.

My musical career would have ended there if not for the enthusiastic encouragement of my friends, none of whom had learned to play the guitar yet and therefore had no idea of how remedial my melodious efforts were.  Falling victim to their encouragement, I imagined a glorious future as the next Gordon Lightfoot. In pursuit of this goal, I learned three more chords and set out to write the great Canadian folk song.

Twelve years later, I had eight more chords, a vast repertoire of crap, four songs that seemed halfway decent, and enough money saved to make a demo tape. I hired a producer and three session musicians, primarily on the basis of their willingness to work between midnight and four in the morning, the cheapest studio rental time available. I couldn’t afford a vocalist, so sang the songs myself, which would have been a disaster if the studio technician hadn’t been a special effects wizard on the sound board.

My still supportive friends were impressed with the results, even though by then, many of them had actually learned to play the guitar and should have known better. Unfortunately, the dozens of singers and recording companies who received my demo tapes did know better. I tossed my musical ambitions into the growing pile of unfulfilled dreams at the back of my mental closet. The experience wasn’t a total loss though. All those late night studio sessions became the catalyst that ultimately led to my first divorce.

Years later during a weekend visit with Wen, her seventeen-year-old daughter, Tan, arrived home with a guitar, the same three chords I had mastered years before, and a just-written first song. “This is fabulous!” I told Tan when she finished playing it for me, in much the same way Wen had enthused over my first effort except with the added emphasis of a person somewhat qualified to know what I was talking about.

Shortly afterward, Tan moved to Vancouver and became a street busker. I felt guilty about this and wondered if was my appreciation that inspired such a risky career move. Would Wen blame me for her daughter’s tragic spiral into a heartbroken bag lady living under a bridge? But my fears were groundless, because unlike my muse, Tan’s was made of sterner stuff.

Tan paid her musical dues on the mean streets. She learned many more chords than I had ever aspired to and developed a unique musical style along with a supportive circle of musician friends who were much more qualified to assess her talent than my friends had been. When her first CD didn’t rocket her to the top of the charts, she didn’t fold like a dying camel the way I had. Although she had less time to devote to music when she started her own family, she kept her dreams rainbow bright by performing at open mic events.

Tan is just not the kind of woman to make piles of unfulfilled dreams, which is why I felt so proud when I clicked on that link. I’m not responsible for Tan’s talent. She was born talented. I’m not responsible for Tan’s courage and persistence. She had those long before she picked up a guitar. But I am, in my own small way, responsible for at least one of the little sparkly bits on Tan’s first rainbow of hope.

I no longer see my musical career as a failure. It has served its purpose in the grand scheme of creative achievement. It can never be over while the thin lady sings.