In an essay in LitHub, Kate Angus urges writers to be kind to themselves when they have a creative block. Sometimes you can get past it simply by letting yourself not write at all, with the hope that lying fallow for a while may be just what you need to replenish and revive your imagination. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Leaving Your Creative Fields Fallow”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. For almost two years after her first book was published, poet and author Kate Angus couldn’t manage to write a single thing. Not an essay, not a chapter, not even one line of poetry. And later, in an essay in the online magazine Literary Hub, she described that agonizing period like this. In the past, writing had felt like pushing over the first domino at the beginning of a long, intricate row. One word would tip forward, knocking another word down, and so on to the next. The words forming sentences all falling into place. And then I would resurface hours later with multiple drafts of poems or an essay written. Now that momentum was gone. I’d type one or two words and stop and stare at the letters.
Then I’d space my cursor backwards, deleting to start again, only to hit another wall. The open document on my computer felt like a white room I was locked inside. No matter how hard I pounded at the walls or how loudly I screamed, I was trapped.
Grant, I can totally relate to that. She ended up trying meditation and writing exercises, and she even took a writing fellowship overseas. But nothing worked. And by the second year, she simply gave up. And when people asked her how her second book was coming along, she changed the subject. And then she writes, just as easily as a cloud obscuring the sun eventually drifts past, one morning I woke up with the first lines of a poem singing in my head. And she got out of bed and started writing and never stopped again. And she came to understand that for her, writer’s block was more like the crop rotation she grew up with in the Midwest. She says, if you grow the same plants in the same field for too many years in a row, the soil gradually loses certain nutrients. And your harvest is at risk of being wiped out by invading insects, microorganisms, or other aggressive plants. And so she’s basically suggesting that, you know, if you’re struggling with writer’s block, maybe you just need to be kinder to yourself, that maybe you should just accept that you’re not blocked at all, but that resting might be a part of your process.
Right. Yeah. That reminds me of something I read years back about the differences between Japanese baseball and American baseball. Really? The Japanese baseball pitchers have shorter careers because they believe in harder training and they don’t let their pitchers rest as often. They play longer games. They practice harder. And so they just don’t last as long.
The American counterparts actually have more successful careers and go on to play better games and have better stats and all around longer lifespans in the business. And it’s pretty much what you’re saying about writing.
Yeah, that was not the direction I expected to go, but yeah, for sure. She also quotes a nature writer in that article who talks about how something that grows and reproduces unchecked is usually a parasite or, say, something cancerous. You know, you need that time to rest and replenish. And, you know, for writers in particular, you’re still working when you’re just staring out that window. I mean, there’s a balance, right?
You also have to be disciplined. But I really appreciate her call to being kinder to yourself. I agree. Yeah. During the pandemic, for example, people kept saying, oh, now’s the time I can get all of these things done. I can learn all these crafts and hobbies that I wanted to do, practice the language that I’ve been not working on. And other people pushed back and said, but wait, isn’t this the time that now that you’ve been denying yourself for yourself? Isn’t this the moment you’ve been waiting for all these years when you wanted open space to be idle, to just enjoy being alive? Maybe you don’t replace lack of work with more work.
That’s a good point that she’s making, a very good point. Recharging the brain is you don’t recharge it with more work, do you, necessarily? Not at all. You push back from that computer and you go outside. I agree with that.
When you’re looking for those creative impulses that come from letting your brain wander, what do you do? How do you recharge? Talk to us, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.
