Sometimes, I can't write which is writer's block because I feel I can't write the best fiction or the best essay. It isn't enough that I can write the best I can do. It has to be the very best. It has to be the kind of writing that turns Gore Vidal green with envy. It has to be the kind of writing that raises Ernest Hemingway out of the grave kind of writing. Of course, I can't do that so I can't write.
Also, what sounds brilliant in the mind sounds mundane on the screen or on paper or when someone like Forest calls you up and tells you that it is crap. Then I run to the lake and just write in my journal where I don't have to be a genus but do have to write and write about how I am not understood by the world.
Oh, there are so many reasons why a writer can't be the best of the best and better than he or she is capable of being although this does not mean the writer doesn't write things that surprises the writer because that happens too. The writing process is such a mysterious process. Sometimes, we are crippled with fear when we leave our bodies and worry about what others think or what our friends and family will think. My friend Ted who writes memoirs told me that before he gave up alcohol and drugs he would drink and take drugs and take to his bed in mortal terror of what his relatives would think of the book he just released because it was so obvious he was writing about them. Then he told me later that they were such Philistines that they didn't even know he wrote books. He wasted his money on all that coke. He was never so glad to give up the drugs although he misses the times he would go to bars.
Ted tells me that Forest writes books that sells and even writes scripts that well known movies are made from but in a few years no one will remember any of his stuff because his work is what Ted calls surface crap. They please people because they don't have to think too much to read it and there is plenty of sex and deviant sex in it. Ted says he knows of several writers who read his books just to get the sex scenes for their own books. One time when Ted was talking to Forest he returned a call and got his servant-wife on the phone. He propositioned her since she said she said he got all of his sex information from their sexual escapades. She said yes and asked where they should meet. Ted was astonished for he was joking and thought she knew he was gay. He told her they had to wait until his meds took care of his STD.
It is true some writers don't have high standards for themselves, but many do. They work darn hard for one sentence or one paragraph. They do research so that what they are writing will be accurate. I read someone's first draft the other day and was knocked over her research of bats which played a part in the story of a biologist. She told me all of the work she did and even the interviews she did with scientists to make sure what she was writing was accurate. Even when you do research, if a fact is too strange for fiction the reader, the editor who sees it first, won't believe it. You have to back it up sometimes in your story with some evidence. One writer could not sell a book until he did that and he put it in the body of the story.It worked. It sold and did very well. There is something to the adage, stranger than fiction.
Sometimes, if you are in a bind when you want to write poetry better than Walt Whitman or win the Nobel Prize with one short story, it is best to write in your journal about the obsession so you can get some balance back. Just seeing these beliefs in writing is enough to get one chuckling to yourself and back to the word processor. I have a friend, Carol, who is an artist and makes an decent income doing book covers, children's books and sells her paintings at science fiction conventions. She also writes on the side and is one of the people who got burnt by a online press service who used her work without pay although it was with her permission. The publisher in question got her mixed up with someone else so that not only did her work get published for no pay, she got no credit for it. She said it took one long soak in the tub before she saw the humor in it and drew a cartoon and sold it to a newspaper and is now considering doing editorial cartoons. She would never have considered doing it without that mistake.
Carol said she knew of an artist who did pornography until the magazine wanted him to do some sex acts he thought might be illegal. He did a children's book instead and had a best seller. People had been telling him all along that he was the best in porn but not anything else. He feels better about his work especially since he has young children. His wife said she does not feel bad about cashing his checks anymore at the supermarket.
A writer's path is a strange one and getting obsessed about being the very best we can be is great but being better than one can possibly be can be the recipe to writer's block. One can say, "I can't write right now because I have writer's block". Forest who writes even during his sleep, as far as I know, never had writer's block. He says he never has. He also says he never edits as it all comes from his brain perfect. One time, I got one of his books free and took an editing pencil to it and I was surprised to see large sections that I would have edited out. Heck, he sells and he likes what he sells and his servant-wife likes to cash his checks at the supermarket. When your brain tells you that you can't write unless it is perfect, take a nice hot bath.
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