1.22 Author, Author

The miracle of the sibling relationship, spelled out in an unselfish act of head-shaving

I intended to write this episode of Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs a while ago. Almost two years ago, in fact, a few weeks after finishing the last post. That’s fitting, if not ironic, because while episode 1.22 of Frasier is ostensibly about brotherly rivalry, in reality it is actually about that malignant curse of the creative mind, writer’s block. Niles, craving the cachet of becoming a published author, is in a tricky situation. He’s signed a book deal, only for the publisher to inform him that the idea for his book has already been done, and he’ll have to come up with a new one (which is not how book deals, nor publishers, work, but that’s neither here nor there.) The publisher gives him a tight deadline, and he’s fresh out of ideas, until the editor suggests Niles and Frasier write a book together: a book about sibling relationships.

Locked in a hotel room together, a tip they picked up from George and Ira Gershwin, they attempt to hammer out a few chapters over a weekend, and instead find themselves locked in a spiral of frustration, anger and despair as the words fail to come. Trapped like caged dogs, a deadline looming for a sample chapter, their petty differences quickly bloom into insurmountable strife which reveals their long-held animosities. You’re a bad writer, a cliché, a hack, you have always been jealous of me, you have always overshadowed me, hell, you stole my mommy! The plot suggests that the writer’s block had exacerbated the long hidden jealousy and neuroses of the two brothers, causing them to explode. No; as a writer, I see all too clearly what is really happening. The long hidden jealousy and neuroses boiling over are symptoms of the writer’s block, and not the other way around.

Writer’s block is a cannibalistic, ravenous form of procrastination. It can make anything its focus, its subject, the smallest flaw or problem, and spin it into a monstrous indictment of the writer as a person. Worse, as a writer. Put simply, writer’s block is the inability of someone who can write to write. Not literally, of course, in terms of putting pen to paper, but rather in terms of structuring one’s ideas, getting sentences to form, finding the spark that starts the fire. If you haven’t experienced it, I wonder if it’s possible to understand; it’s not merely procrastination, although that’s an element of it, but, well, a block, an almost physical sensation that you can’t assault what Frasier describes as “the tyranny of the blank page”. And its effects are sometimes disastrous; lost time, lost confidence, even lost work, as an idea that started with dynamism peters out to the point where one simply forgets what you ever saw in it in the first place.

I’m not certain it’s an absolute state, something you have, so much as a syndrome of challenges, habits and, indeed, neuroses that can come together in different configurations to stymie your work. Not everyone gets it, different writers get it to different degrees and intensities, for different lengths of time, and, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a good or bad writer, a productive or unproductive one: it can strike anyone.

Writers, authors, we can all agree, can be a touch precious about their craft. To those who don’t write, our complaints can come across as luvvie behaviour. We are not nurses or binmen: nobody will die if we don’t hit today’s word-count, and waste will not pile up to rot in the streets were our words to go unwritten. I get it. That said, to be blocked, to want or need to write and find it impossible, is a uniquely unpleasant experience. It’s extremely frustrating to see yourself wasting time that you can’t afford to waste, and to sit and try and fail is an almost physiological experience: it’s not a surprise to me that for so many writers, walking is an intrinsic part of their practice, shaking off the block. One gets jittery (at least I do), and procrastinates in futility, filling in tax returns or reordering one’s bookshelves or cleaning the fridge, out of an anxiety around wasted time, the whole while knowing that the thing you want to do, need to do, and actually can do, is still, somehow, not happening, not available to you. In Author, Author, its effects are turbocharged in the hotel room. Unable to agree even on an opening line, Frasier soon takes to drink, while Niles allows the writer’s block to turn inwards, as so often happens, and begins doubting the basis of all his abilities and achievements. The block is hungry.

I wrote in an earlier essay in this series about my relationship to Frasier being deeply tied in to my own history of depression. One notable feature of that depression, and with my ineffective strategies to get out of it, was an increasing obsessiveness with quantifying productivity. At its worst, on days where I would struggle to get out of bed at all, when my body and brain had slowed down into a sort of emotionless sludge, I would make little deals with myself, bartering around doing something, anything that would be worthy of some self-esteem. Perhaps that would be to take a shower, to pick up some groceries, maybe to read a page or two of a book. In return, I would give myself a reward; to get back in bed, to jerk off, or, nearly always, to drink or use drugs. Great, I’d done something! But wait: was that all I’d done?

The bartering, and the slight sense of control and achievement they gave me, were just more symptoms of depression, of course. It took therapy and, ironically, more drugs to deal with the underlying problems. But even after all that, productivity is still deeply, intimately intertwined with my sense of self. And, I think, there’s no problem with that, actually. Having a vocation in one’s life, and deriving a sense of achievement, esteem, and respect from it is really something that has powered some of the best things humans have done. What is more, knowing that the thing that keeps me relatively healthy and sane is getting words onto pages, ideas into forms, narratives into books, is far from a lamentable situation to be in. Yet there’s still a nagging sense that wanting to get stuff done is just as much part of my crazy as lying in bed, smoking. Writer’s block is the vestigial tail of all those old neuroses for me, a hanger-on that can take me back to depression like an express train. It’s not depression, not by a long shot, but it looks so much like it that sometimes I get confused.

That’s not helped by the fact that the cure to writer’s block, for me, looks a lot like the sort of bartering and productivity management that used to be a part of that cluster of depressive symptoms. I force myself to write, to read. I set myself targets, and stay in my office until I reach them. I fool my brain, too, with similar rituals of fake productivity, writing three or four pages of nonsense that I intend to through away, like jump-starting a car on a frosty morning. I log word counts, tick off daily habits, record pages read and pages written on a whiteboard, on my phone, on my computer. It’s the only way to ensure that I get it done, daily.

Not everyone will agree, but I think writing, like most artforms, requires a daily practice. Once writing becomes what you do, it transforms from a way of communicating to a way of thinking, a way of expressing to a way of imagining. You don’t have an idea, and write it down: instead, you write, and the ideas emerge within the writing, just like the best painters don’t paint ideas, they let ideas emerge in the practice of painting. Writing becomes what you do, a form into which other ideas, sensations, emotions might flow and fill up. On the one hand, it’s an immense privilege to be able to have the time and space to write, something that, despite everything I’ve said, is a deeply enjoyable thing to do, when it works. On the other hand, tying your livelihood to it is another bargain one makes; not only can I afford to write, I can’t afford not to.

The same cannot be said for Frasier and Niles. Writing is not their practice, psychiatry is. They expect, like many people, to be able to sit down and write a book from scratch, just like that, and they do it for the expected prestige that being published authors will bring them. With nothing riding on it, no creative mental infrastructure to manifest it, and yet an overpowering sense that what they are doing is deeply important and must be done just right, it’s no wonder that the creeping cloud of writer’s block overwhelms and chokes them. The brotherly war that emerges between them is not a resurfaced Jungian archetype or a Freudian neuroses playing out: it’s just another way to procrastinate. Of course, I’d never fall into such an obvious trap. I’d never lose my focus. I’d never write 1500 words about an episode of Frasier when I haven’t even started on my next book proposal…

Check out more of my writing at Huw Lemmey’s Utopian Drivel