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.