Writing Blocks

Here’s the idea. On the desk is what appears to be a small cinder block… you know, grubby, off-white the color of old cottage cheese, two holes in the top.  It’s about 4” x 8” and maybe 10” high.  But it’s not a cinder block at all. It’s a stack of peel-off pages. In the graphic on top, in the hole on the left side is “Writer’s Block” in big. Each page has a writing prompt, then perhaps four blank lined pages after it.

Every Monday is a new assignment, weekends off.

Try this: Set a kitchen timer for 15 minutes. Write as fast as you can – anything that comes to mind. Writing often feels like a duty — “I’m supposed to be writing.” A timer means you have to write only until the bell rings.

My student, Cecilia Worth, described what it’s like for her to write in short timed bursts:

I do not stop for a minimum of 15 minutes. What I have found is that it will be weird and superficial for a while, and suddenly, like breaking through a long cloudy airplane run and seeing the green field below, I consciously put off the voice that tells me to stop because I have to go to the store, to phone, to lay off because the topic is garbage. Sort of like I’m waving it off, while writing furiously, saying, wait, wait, I just have to finish this. This is certainly not a new exercise, but it works every time for me. I believe that doing it impresses my subconscious that writing is indeed a priority. Once I did this every day at the same time for three months, at the end of which my piece on a patient with HIV was published in the Sunday New York Times magazine.

Steve Martin had this to say on the subject of writer’s block: “Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” His trick is to find a wonderful sentence in a novel, and copy it down. “Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don’t, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else’s work—unless you’re friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there’s no jail time.”

Try it.

Write for 15 minutes. Try to get image and detail into every sentence. You’ll be amazed at what comes up on your screen. Instead of saying, “My mother was untidy,” you’ll show us your mother in her laddered nylons, her shimmering slip with the lace coming off, the lipstick hastily slashed on.

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Today you will build images by adding appositives. “Apposition” means that one thing is put beside another; an appositive is a word or group of words that add detail to the original. The italics below show appositives added to the original sentence:

“I moved back to Kansas with its flat plains and harsh winters.”

“I gave away the household furnishings we’d used the two years we’d lived together before marriage, the towels from Goodwill in shades of 70s earth tones, the brown comforter with the burn hole that had become a tear, the odd-lot silverware with the bent fork tines and dull-edged knives.

“Her apartment was messy, tank tops hanging off the oven, pizza boxes stacked in the open bottom dresser drawer, a fuchsia bra wrapped around a lampshade and forgotten.”

“Within fifteen minutes a new scent began to waft its way through the kitchen, edging through the other, more pleasant odors like an impatient man pushing his way through a crowd.”

“He turned the car to the right, the plastic bobblehead Jesus on the dash nodding as if to say, ‘Hard call, son, but you made the right choice.’ ”

Tell a story of a room from your childhood. What did the room see? What were its secrets? Who spent time in this room? Who was not allowed in this room? What did the room feel like? Look like? What did you feel like when you were in this room? How did your body feel? Whom did the room belong to? What does the room remember?

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Write a page each on the themes of:

• My mother’s house
• My father’s hands
• My father’s house
• My mother’s hands

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Write a list of details from your childhood. (My own list would include milk delivered in glass bottles, metal ice cube trays with levers, cap guns, hula-hoops, linoleum flooring patterned to look like bricks, and clothespin guns.)

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Select a memory from your childhood (between ages 5 and 15, say). What did you feel at the time of the event? Go through the senses of touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. Describe the colors you remember, and how the event made you feel. What impact has this memory had on you? Invent the details you don’t remember.

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Steinbeck said: “Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate.”

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To capture a character quickly: tell us three things they love,  three things they hate. And say why.

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Find the points of change (turning points, learning points) in your life, and you will find your material: the time you realized you were gay, that your mother was not going to get better, that it was a mistake to move to the country, that you are not going through with the adoption. Or the day you threw your estranged husband’s nail gun into the bushes, and realized that the worst part of divorce for you was not how badly your spouse behaved, but how badly the process made you behave. The time your Volkswagen filled with twenty pairs of expensive shoes was stolen in Mexico, and to your surprise you were glad. The time you discovered you had a twin who died at birth, and decided to become a pediatrician.

Write about a time you changed.

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Write about the contents of your closet. Who did you buy that rabbit shearling fur coat for? And those tall, spiked black boots, the ones that were going to change your life? How many of the clothes fit you, or fit who you are now? Be specific.

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Tell  a story in 200 words or less.  For example:

My father was going to die. I knew that if I didn’t confront him with all these angry feelings I had that I would be stuck with them after he died. I confronted him at his house in Minneapolis, MN, told him how angry I was at him, and threw a Polaroid camera on the floor. He was amazed. Not mad — amazed that I felt that way. He had no idea. I felt much freer after that. AND THEN…he didn’t die. So we had around ten years after that in which we had a nice relationship with most of the baggage just dropped overboard…

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Make a huge deal of  a very small  incident, such as your broken  shoelace.

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Start a piece with this phrase: “And another thing about …”

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Fiddle with a piece of yours by adding  three lines under every existing line, to force yourself deeper. I have my students do this exercise, especially those who seem to be able to race through a complex story in three pages. Example:

I woke up. Something had brought me up from the dream about a giant squid wearing sunglasses. I listened, but heard only the backfire of a car passing on the street. My muddy pants and shirt lay in a heap on the rug next to the bed. I got dressed.

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Cluster ideas. First described by Gabriele Rico in Writing the Natural Way, clustering allows you to jot down ideas and make rapid connections between them. Write down whatever you’re working on in the center of a page, “scene at the lake,” or “falling down the stairs,” draw a circle around it, and then free-associate. Use  this technique to generate new ideas rapidly. It works because you can range all over the place, making fast monkey-mind connections — the way we think.

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Write a piece about cleaning something out: a fridge, a drawer, a room, a garage. Show that you’re not just physically making space, that you’re also making mental space, letting go of an old self and making room for who you are now, and who you want to be.

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Write a piece that begins with a foreboding smell.

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Write a detailed map of your childhood neighborhood, the streets, houses, etc, putting in notes about incidents as you remember them. Or of the rooms in your childhood house. Write a story that surfaces during this exercise

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Write a four paragraph piece—very short

• Paragraph 1: Focus on a moment from an early childhood , and render that moment with precise sensory detail.
• Paragraph 2: Being with a phrase such as “For the next decade….” Which will push the writing toward summary (narrated story, as opposed to scene).
• Paragraph 3: Begin with a line of dialogue and move into scene. This brings the focus back to an immediate moment and increases the intensity.
• Paragraph 4: Write

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Read a writer you admire for twenty minutes and then write for ten minutes in his style, on any topic