writer’s block | Jane Alexander author

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been absorbed in rewrites of my next novel. It’s not the first set of revisions, and perhaps my writing process is unusually inefficient: it’s not until the second draft that I’ll share the work-in-progress with a couple of trusted writer-readers, then the third draft goes off to my agent, and comes back for more (thankfully, relatively minor) amendments.

Writing is hard: all writers say it (sheepishly, because it’s not like we’re working down a coal mine). And some days, rewriting is the hardest thing of all. Every word, every sentence, has to be hauled up from the deep, to lie motionless on the page – if not dead, then at least in a critical condition. I worry that if I’m boring myself I’ll certainly bore the reader; I know every word will have to be rewritten yet again. But as I tell my students, you can’t rewrite a blank page – so there’s no choice but to carry on.

When it’s a slog like this, when everything I write seems flat and awful, that’s when I find myself wondering if it’s too late to retrain as a gardener or a dog-walker. Something useful and energetic, with plenty of fresh air.

But then … then I reach a part of the book where it’s like I’ve remembered all over again how to write. And the difference is in the unexpected. It’s about whether or not I’m surprising myself – with the turn a conversation takes, or a connection I hadn’t known was there, or just a sentence that has energy and voice, that seems to write itself rather than lurking around half-formed until I clumsily patch it together.

This is why some writers prefer not to plan their novels at all: knowing where they’re meant to be going takes away the sense of adventure and the joy of discovery. If you know what you’re going to write, what’s the point in writing it? And even though I’m a planner, I still need that sense of unexpectedness. Making minor changes to a scene may seem more efficient than rewriting that scene from scratch, but I’ve realised it’s actually harder and more time-consuming – because if you’re tinkering round the edges of something that already exists, there’s less room for surprise, less pleasure in making something fresh and new and alive.

And as with most things I learn about writing, I’ll forget this – and have to discover it all over again when it’s time to rewrite the novel after this one.

Writing is necessarily solitary, and though I get to meet all kinds of interesting people through teaching creative writing, opportunities to share experiences with, and learn from, other writer-teachers can be hard to come by. So it was exciting to attend my first National Association of Writers in Education conference a couple of weeks back, and to find myself surrounded by hundreds of other professional ‘writers in education’. Over three days of seminars, workshops and presentations we covered subjects ranging from flash fiction for beginner writers, with the hugely enthusiastic Carrie Etter, to storytelling with military veterans.

One of the most surprising sessions for me focused on the benefits of integrating drawing with your writing practice. Though there are plenty of accomplished writer-artists (strangely, the examples that spring to mind are all Scottish: John Byrne, Alasdair Gray, Ian Hamilton Findlay…) I’ve tended to think of drawing and writing as mutually exclusive activities. Drawing is about looking – looking hard – and if I’m working on a piece of writing I’m usually oblivious to the detail of the world around me, because I’m so thoroughly absorbed in the world I’m imagining.

So what was surprising about the activities our experts (Patricia Ann McNair and Philip Hartigan from Columbia College Chicago) asked us to try? After some scribbly warm-ups, we made ‘blind mono’ drawings of something or someone in the room – line drawings made without looking at the subject and without lifting pen from paper. And while we drew, we were supposed to think about a piece of writing we were working on. Holding those two activities in my head at the same time was a challenge, and I didn’t feel I managed it very well. But then we turned over our paper and began a ‘blind writing’, working fast and covering up each line of text as soon as we’d written it – and I was amazed at how fluently ideas arrived for a a story that had been stuck for a while at the ‘vague inspiration’ stage.

Drawing with writing on reverse — My ‘blind mono’ drawing

Philip and Patricia suggested this effect may be to do with a physical openness, a loosening up that transfers itself from the physical process of drawing to the more static, hunched-over business of writing. Perhaps it’s as simple as using movement to shake the ideas loose, in the same way that going for a walk can unstick you creatively. And I’m not sure how it would work with writers who haven’t drawn since school, who might well have negative preconceptions about their ability to draw ‘well’. But – even though I’m quite pleased with my blind mono – this isn’t about drawing well: what I learned was that you have to let go of the idea of making a good picture, to make good writing.