A Time (Not) to Write

By Christopher Allen

The pause is as important as the note.
~Truman Fisher

When I was working on a novel, I found it easy to get up at four in the morning and write for two hours before work. Two years, two novels, and at least two hundred rejections later, I was still rolling out of bed with endless energy to write. Then my work situation changed. I stopped teaching on Mondays and Fridays, so I told myself these were my days to write. Instead of two hours, I had eight hours. I became even more prolific, and I started publishing. My short stories appeared in dozens of journals, I won a few contests, and I was even nominated for a few awards. I named my muse Trusty, and we made a good team.

Then, inexplicably, I hit the Berlin Wall of writing blocks, as if I had reached an impasse and run out of gas at the same time. Though I felt immobile, the piles and piles of ideas on my desk told me something else was going on. I wasn't so much dealing with writer's block as writer's burnout. So I organized. I stacked my ideas into neat little Post-it note towers — the first time my desk had known "neat" in years — and stared at my computer screen, waiting for Trusty. Nothing.

"You have to chain yourself to your desk and write every day anyway," a writing compadre told me. "Even when your muse doesn't feel like writing."

"Easy for you to say," I said. "You always feel like writing. And it's always good."

"Not true," she said. "I throw a lot away."

"The problem is, right now I'm not writing anything."

"Write 'Mary had a little lamb' a thousand times."

"I probably won't do that. Got anything else?"

"Write from prompts," she said. "There are thousands on the Internet."

"I've tried them. I never..."

"Do timed writing exercises. Use photographs as prompts. Record your dreams. Lyrics! Write anything that comes into your head."

"I guess I could write 'I need a nap' a thousand times."

"Great!" she said without irony. "And when you're done, fling your pages into the furnace to get the gold," she cheered. "Ram your idea icebergs for the shards!"

"What kind of coffee do you drink?" I asked, exhausted.

Despite the silly metaphors, I told her I'd give her advice a test run. After all, this is the wisdom almost all books on the craft of writing impart: discipline, routine, commitment. Write twenty pages to get twenty lines. Burn your first novel. Dig through the ashes to find that one brilliant yet fading ember.

I had gone through periods of writing drought before, but for the last ten years Trusty had always returned, always unannounced — in weighty times of sadness, in frenetic times of boundless energy, on a rainy November day in Munich, on a noisy beach in Brazil. She'd never gone on holiday for more than a few days.

Even if writing seemed to be an impenetrable brick wall, I was always sure one morning I'd wake up, go to my computer and just start writing something I loved. But after writing two hundred pages of metaphorical garbage, none of which came even close to being gold, embers or shards of icebergs (whatever that meant), the day came when I had to admit my muse, Trusty, was either dead or at least on extended sabbatical in Costa Rica. Maybe she'd joined a convent.

That day, I stretched, got up from my computer and went for a walk. I said to myself, "If Trusty's going to be that way, let her find me this time." There's a time to write, and there's a time to play hard-to-get with your muse, a time to walk away from your words and just enjoy the silence. I walked in the forest behind my house, through the old town in Munich, up and down the Thames in London. I people-watched. I started taking photographs. Sometimes I even turned the camera around and took goofy pictures of myself.

Even when I was home at my computer, I refused to write prose. I surfed and chatted, wandering from site to site. I convinced myself that maintaining my Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, StumbleUpon and blog presences was important, too. I dallied. I played Scrabble, Lexulous, and Words with Friends. As long as they weren't my words, I was fine.

I read all the books in my office that had been stacking up over the previous year. I read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest — or at least I tried. Supportive friends sent me books. "You'll love this," a friend said. "He writes like you." Not like me lately, I thought, unless this is a book of shopping lists.

When I confessed my problems to my writers' group, they sent me their own stories of writing worries and weariness, from burnout to frozen shoulders. The leitmotif was obvious: There is a time not to write.

Comforted, I played hard-to-get for a few more months. During this time, though, I wrote a few book reviews for friends (my muse had never been much help with this sort of writing anyway). I concentrated on editing for other people. Ironically and perhaps a tad dishonestly, I gave a few interviews on my approach to writing, hoping to actually find a new way in. And one day it happened — as always, unexpected.

When she finally returned, I took a long look at her and shook my head. She didn't look like my muse, Trusty, at all. It was as if the muse agency had sent one that sort of looked like Trusty but had a slightly droller sense of humor. She wore reading glasses and complained of jetlag. She was snarkier and older.

But she had mud on her shoes — from the forest. She knew every inch of the Thames Path in London. She boasted that she'd read Infinite Jest — or at least she'd tried. She grumbled but never apologized for her absence; she simply sat down and started knocking down my neat towers of ideas, casting them into the furnace and handing me tiny — quite tiny at first — shards of gold.

 

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