Writer's block

When I arrived at college -- a scared freshman, hoping only to go unnoticed and unridiculed among my classmates, bright kids who seemed more self-confident than I -- I was informed of a schedule change. Rather than the normal, required three quarters of freshman English, the school instead assigned me -- God knows why -- to three quarters of honors English. This assignment saved me from writing weekly essays designed to discover whether I habitually let my participial phrases dangle, my infinitives split, or my commas splice.

Instead, I was required to write essays that, for example -- and I do recall this one, specifically -- asked me to analyze, compare and contrast two poems about the Nativity: The Magi, by Yeats, and The Oxen, by Thomas Hardy. And to explain which I liked better, and why. In a minimum of 500 words. Until that point, I had never heard of either Yeats or Hardy, had dealt with poems mainly as panicky ordeals of last minute memorization, and had skated through high school fulfilling most of my English requirements by writing for the school paper and yearbook.

I remember all too well reading those two poems over and over, the night before the essay was due, trying to think of one intelligent comment I could make about them. Something that would flesh out a single paragraph, let alone 500 words. I sat at my desk, watching the second hand of the clock tick in circles around the dial.

I tasted, for the first time in my life, I suspect, the melancholy bite of writer's block.

I thought back to my freshman experiences this morning, as I read the entertaining essay by Dan Kois -- "Burn Before Reading" -- in the New York Times book review section. Kois discusses the experiences of well-known American novelists, one or more of whose writings never saw the light of day (or at least the ink of printing), not because they were rejected by a publisher, but because the author just plain gave up. He had written himself into a corner. Or he'd found himself writing on and on, watching his plot become more and more unwieldy, more and more absurd. Or he'd shyly shown a bit of what he'd written to friends, and had been stung by their response. Or by their lack of response: Author Jennifer Egan recalled writing 600 pages of an attempted novel, back when she was 22.

"I would send this book to people," she said, "and they would become unreachable. And that includes my mother."

She abandoned the book.

Once past college, my own writing was limited mostly to legal writing. You don't get writer's block doing legal writing. First of all, you have a deadline looming a few days in the future -- you don't find yourself spending a year or two telling your friends, over a third round of drinks: "Me? Oh, I'm still working away on that appellate brief. It's looking great! I should have it finished soon and off to my publisher."

Second, you have space limitations -- the court looks with disfavor on 600-page briefs, thank you very much; in fact, the judges will never see a 600-page brief. The court clerk bounces back -- unread and unappreciated -- any brief that exceeds page limits by even a sentence. Also, you have a number of specific and vital points that need to be addressed within those page limits. As with a person waiting to be hanged in a fortnight, fitting all your legal arguments into the prescribed page limitation as a deadline rapidly approaches tends to concentrate your mind wonderfully.

Third, no one expects stylistic beauty in legal briefing. (Although sometimes I've tried. A former law school writing instructor, who had moved on to serve as state Supreme Court commissioner, once sent me a personal note after reading one of my briefs: "Egad, Don! Didn't I teach you any self-restraint at all?") The court hopes only -- often futilely -- for a brief that's logical.

And last -- but not necessarily least -- I never have to worry about opening the newspaper one fine morning and finding myself confronted by a snarky review of my appellate brief, exposing my writing to the ridicule of the literary world.

So, although I've churned out an enormous number of words as a lawyer, writer's block hasn't been much of a problem.

And then, four years ago, I began writing this blog. No deadlines. No word limits. No assigned topics. No teacher to impress. Nothing to sell to a publisher. A few anonymous readers, as disclosed by my counter. But rarely a comment published after posts appear, criticizing either my style or my content. I could write a post comparing and contrasting the Hardy and Yeats poems by pointing out, excitedly, that they both seem to be about the first Christmas, and that they both sound kind of cool in different ways, and no one would suggest with disgust that I was being a tad superficial.

And yet. And yet, when it comes to writing for my blog, I do frequently get writer's block. I sometimes will start to write an essay -- like this one, itself, for example -- which, although it starts out well and contains some interesting ideas, leads me eventually to a point where I can't quite figure out where I planned to go with it. Or how to stop. Or how to even think of a graceful exit line that would disguise my embarrassment. And in such cases, I really wish I'd never even begun to write a post on that particular day.

But -- unlike those authors discussed so amusingly in Kois's essay -- I don't always just throw my aborted efforts away and try another story another day.

In today's world, it's all too easy to just throw up your hands, hit the "Publish Post" button, and walk away.

And sometimes that's exactly what I do.