Gregory Frost Explains Writer's Block
Get Your Story Written
What's this writer's block thing?
It’s a large piece of wood that shoves itself in the way of the story every so often. Okay, except for the wood part, I think writer’s block is a catch-all term for at least a dozen phenomena. One is people who can’t figure out where or how to start their story and so are trapped forever in aspic waiting for some half-drunken Muse to come and rescue them. Solution: Shut up, sit down, and write the bloody thing wrong. Period. Totally mess it up. Start in the wrong place. Choose the wrong POV. I don’t care. But write it. Only by actually writing the thing will you figure out how to write it. If you’re going to sit there and wait and wait and wait for divine intervention…well, good luck with that. Be sure to lay in a year’s supply of Dead Guy Ale.
Then there’s a writer’s block that’s the result of wading into the middle of the work and losing direction, nerve. Maureen McHugh calls it the “Dark Night of Despair” and it’s very common. You look back at the ravaged path you’ve walked to get this far, and look ahead into a bleak and unknown (because it’s unwritten) future and that little editorial voice in your head starts telling you that you’re an idiot, you suck, what made you think you had a clue how to write this book? And if you listen to that voice you will die there. Mark Twain, who used shipbuilding as a metaphor for writing novels, said his backyard was strewn with half-built ships. He was someone who would write 100 pages or so and lose interest in the project. Sometimes he came back to it, and we have Huckleberry Finn as a result. A lot of times he didn’t. Again, the only solution I know is to write through this, deny the despair and push on.
You will come out somewhere. That’s only two of the many. In most cases, telling the voices to shut the hell up and plunging into the writing, however hateful, is the only way out. And recognize that nearly every published writer suffers from these blocks. There’s nothing wrong with you just because you locked up in the middle.
If you could invite any three authors (living or dead) to a dinner party, who would they be? What would you ask them?
Mikhail Bulgakov. I would ask him how he managed to write one of the greatest satirical novels in the world even as the government under Stalin banned his plays and books at nearly every turn. Even a play he wrote to glorify Stalin was banned—that’s how much the elite literary swine in charge despised and envied him. Yes, I would like to hear that story.
T.C. Boyle: Just because I can talk with him for hours on end, and we hardly ever do.
Junot Diaz: I met him last fall, thought he was a terrific person, and would like to know him better.
(And Conrad, so I could ask why Poland is never mentioned anywhere in his fiction; and Bruno Schulz just to visit The Street of Crocodiles; and Dickens, and Poe, and…nope, three is not enough.)
If you could write any story or book, and not have to worry about whether it would sell well or have any kind of backlash, what would the tale be about?
I don’t know, to the extent that I already don’t really worry about backlash and the like. I would like to sell well (only been a qualified best-seller once so far), but as it is, I’m writing what I want to. I got to savage the jackals Bush and Cheney in a Cthulhu-western tale, “Dub,” for the Weird Trails anthology. I’ve written about Zapatistas and American corporate greed and cruelty in “Madonna of the Maquiladora.” I’ve had my say about the depravity of organized religion in Fitcher’s Brides.
I don’t really think I’m holding back here. We live in a world run by greedheaded gobshites who whine and demand that we pick up the tab when they make big poopie on Wall Street, but will rape your mother with a dead goat to get their $15 million bonus. To borrow a line from Al Pacino, I’m just getting warmed up—and there is no end in sight.
Read part one of the interview HERE
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