The Best of 2009: Article

[I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, in case you're all like, what's with the theme?]

Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.

This article from the Wall Street Journal, “How to Write a Great Novel,” blew my mind. And it continues to blow my mind. I’m a writer. I write. It’s what I do. And most of my writing is for pay; there was a time when the opposite was true. But over the last few years I’ve experienced an embarrassingly crippling case of writer’s block. It has lifted occasionally, here and there, but it’s always come back. So much so, that at some point I wondered if I should just stop calling myself a writer. After all, a writer writes. And I was doing no such thing.  I liked to joke that I felt bad for the main characters in a couple of my short stories; one had been stuck in his hotel room and the other on his deck for four years.  And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I just didn’t have it in me, or the words wanted nothing to do with me, or the planets had aligned wrong, or who knows what. But it was hideous, in that non-life-threatening sort of vacuum inside which these things occur.

Over the last few months I’ve undertaken a lot of reframing, perspective-shifting, boundary-stretching and other uncomfortable activities. Somewhere along the line, I decided to take a crack at my favorite unfinished story. I decided to change one minor detail about a secondary character, and–absurdly, miraculously–the story fell into place. Boom! Just like that. Within twenty minutes it was done.  And I’d realized (I could feel it!) the block was gone. Writing had lifted its ban on me. I had been allowed back into the club.

(One detail. One detail belonging to a secondary character. That was all it had taken. That felt a little freaky to me.)

Well, then I found the article. And as I read about the freaky methods that all these highly respected writers (one of my own favorites, Michael Ondaatje, among them) employ to get the words out of their souls and onto the page, I realized that all along I’d assumed I was doing it wrong, somehow. That I was being foolish or half-assed about it. That a real writer wouldn’t be so blocked, so terrified, so awkward at going about her business. And I had been wrong.

I’m still smiling about that.