writer’s block

I ASSUMED I’D WRITE A lot over the Christmas break. I’d planned to draft a personal essay to submit to a prestigious prize. I wanted to work on my memoir, really iron out the proposal. I thought I might start the academic article that’s been swirling like snow-globe particles in my brain for weeks, maybe months. Instead, I did anything else I could think of. I tidied my wardrobe. I cried every day about one thing or another. I napped. I cooked. We drove places in the car.

Other than that, the time simply passed. I wasted it. Somebody asked me in an email just this morning how I spent my leave, and I found I couldn’t quite remember.

I certainly didn’t write much.

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY father used to bring home blocks of printer paper from work for me to write on – the kind with holes down each side, designed to hook onto a dot matrix printer. You’d have to tear the perforated pages apart, all joined at the top and bottom forming a giant, never-ending zig-zag, and there was nothing like a fresh new block, perfectly rectangular, undisturbed. No torn edges. No mistakes yet.

At one stage, for some reason, I had a bedroom all to myself in our janky suburban house. I didn’t have to share with my siblings. And I can recall that my wooden desk – the one with the secret compartment built into the underside – was pushed up against the eastern window so I could sit under the louvres and gaze out to the side of the house where our guava tree grew, the side where our neighbours lived in a duplex, some of them Sri Lankan, and the fragrance of sizzling spices often wafted over the barbed-wire fence into our own kitchen, the site of tetra-packed milk and many a bowl of pasta served with ketchup and grated cheddar. I have one clear memory of sitting at that desk, writing onto the printer paper Dad had given me, having the loveliest time. I was writing a story – about what I’ve now forgotten – twins, I think – though for years I know I could remember. Isn’t it strange to have a memory of a memory, an impression of an impression, when the first one has been lost?

I wrote back then because my parents used to tell us to go entertain ourselves. My brother read Asterix comics, tinkered with Lego, played on the computer. My sister and I practised gymnastics in the back yard and dressed our Barbies in tiny clothes. But I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, especially on school holidays. I wrote stories for my siblings when we stayed in a unit on the beach at Madang, somewhere close to where the Robinson Crusoe movie was filmed a few years later in 1997. Back in Australia, as a teenager, I drafted what seemed like half a novel on my best friend’s bedroom floor, feeding her page after page of my Queensland cursive during a week of the summer break.

It seemed much easier all those years ago.

THE OTHER NIGHT, WHEN GROPING around for a blank notebook in the top drawer of my filing cabinet, I found in its place a journal that was filled with my scratchy, loopy handwriting. Curious, I opened to a random page and started reading. I’m not sure which realisation felt worse: Oh, I must have been severely depressed when I wrote this. Oh, wow, this writing is terrible.

My favourite co-worker suggested that I burn the journal in a ceremony of some kind, feeding the pages one by one into an open flame. I wondered about asking my husband to light the fire pit so we could toast marshmallows and farewell this depressive episode and purple prose with all the dignity and aplomb they deserved. The thought of dying and having someone riffle through that notebook thinking, ‘What a cliché!’ or, worse, ‘Did a Year 9 student write this the night before their English assignment was due?’ douses me with hot-faced shame.

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW IS A VISUAL ARTIST. First she was a midwife. Then she went back to university to study art.

She paints, mostly. Her paintings are beautiful.

‘It took me fifty years to stop worrying what other people thought of my art,’ she told me once, a few years ago. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Fifty years. FIFTY YEARS.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

JOAN DIDION ONCE COMMENTED THAT ‘the impulse to write is a peculiarly compulsive one’ and that people who write things down are ‘lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss’.

I was not a particularly unhappy, anxious child until the onset of puberty, when a bout of malaria and Dengue fever I experienced at the age of 11 seemed to rewrite some basic code at the source of who I was, who I could be. I can remember lying on my stomach at the clinic in Top Town, lying there prone and immobile on the crisp, white sheet, the crunchy feeling of the blue vinyl mattress uncomfortable against my skin. The clinic smelt of rubbing alcohol and something else. Iodine? I don’t know what it was, but I’d know it anywhere if I smelt it again. Clean yet unpleasant.

Attached to this memory is a feeling of helplessness. To treat malaria, you usually had to administer three doses of quinine, on alternating sides, a couple of days apart. A nurse would pull quinine from a vial into a syringe using a large sterile needle and then push that needle into the patient’s buttock. The pain was indescribable – worse than an epidural, my mother insisted when she succumbed to malaria herself at one point or another – a deep, fiery ache that spread through your flesh in a propulsive, unstoppable burst. I was too sick to move, too sick to react. Thirty years later, and my sciatic nerve has never recovered. My thighs remain numb on each side from two courses of treatment, five years apart.

For a long time afterwards, I wasn’t myself. One of the most noticeable changes was that I didn’t want to go to school, didn’t want to do my homework, couldn’t complete assignments on time. I became detached and paranoid and melancholy. In high school, I was lonely, and I retreated often into writing, but I didn’t characterise myself as a writer: I had my heart set on studying linguistics. By the time I enrolled at university, when I was 19 or 20, the comfortable pleasure I’d taken as a child in writing had all but dissipated. I wasn’t sure I was any good. Yet I couldn’t seem to stop.

I’M SITTING IN AN INNER-CITY lounge affiliated with the institution I work for. I’m sitting in a green leather chair. The ceiling is domed and from it are suspended dozens of softly glowing pendant lights. I could probably do without the constant stream of jazz music. But this could otherwise be an ideal place to write – though far removed from that wooden desk beneath the louvred window overlooking a sprawling guava tree and our neighbours’ duplex.

I’ve been thinking about why I write – and why I so often avoid it. Perhaps ‘avoid’ is the wrong word if the compulsion is typically present. Maybe ‘fail to make time or space for’ is a better way of putting it. Even then, however, every so often, something disorienting happens: I feel completely emptied of language. I don’t know how else to put it. I can often feel the emptiness descend. I’ll try to offer an opinion at work, try to describe a phenomenon, justify a perspective, summarise something I’ve seen or read, and I find that I can’t. I make it halfway through a sentence, and the rest of it won’t come together, won’t coagulate. I draw a blank.

People call it ‘brain fog’ when their cognition is disrupted like this, as if the problem is one of suffocation, of halting pace, or amorphousness, not an unsettling absence, this total emptiness, like a hard drive wiped clean. I feel like that child self again, too sick in some way to move, to talk. Too changed to write.

SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME THAT writing is not just pen on paper or fingers on keyboard – it’s not just adding words to a page. ‘You need thinking time, nothing time,’ she said. ‘You need opportunities for your sub-conscious to solve problems that your conscious mind cannot.’

Back then, I’d walk loops around the central court of my university campus, observing the gargoyles at the tops of the sandstone columns. One loop was around 1,000 steps. I’d do two. Or sometimes I’d meet with my PhD supervisor, and she’d call it ‘tape-recorder time’. During those meetings, by speaking out loud about whatever it was I was trying to write – that is, by changing the format from text to speech – I could make breakthroughs that otherwise might never have come, no matter how many times I returned to my laptop, my desk beside a bay window overlooking that central court, another far cry from the little girl’s desk and all those blocks of printer paper with the holes punched down their sides.

These things used to help.

TO WRITE FEELS A LITTLE silly, no? More than that, it feels indulgent, increasingly futile. Just think about it. There are more people alive today than ever before, more than 8.2 billion of us crowding the Earth. Among those billions of people are also more writers than ever before – more books, more magazines, more journals, more blogs, more newsletters, more zines. If you open a social media application, you’ll immediately be confronted by more voices than you can possibly distinguish, all needing to be heard as a matter of some urgency, if not political necessity.

I wonder, I really do, if occasionally I just reach my limit. If we all do.

There’s a line of a song that returns to me often – No more I love yous; the language is leaving me – which I always assumed was about dementia, or perhaps mental illness. For reference, the song was written by British musicians David Freeman and Joseph Hughes and recorded by them, in 1986, as their band called Lover Speaks; it was later re-recorded by Annie Lennox and became a chart-topping single in 1995. Like most pop songs, it’s actually about a break-up.

But who can’t identify?

No more, no more for now. The language is leaving me.

IN A FEW DAYS TIME, I’ll be recovering from surgery, and the thought of being cut apart and then put back together brings me a peculiar sense of peace, as if, just for a moment, nothing will be expected of me except to lie still, to exist, to rest, to recover, to heal. Nothing more, nothing less.

No deadlines, no word goals, no guilt. No guilt.

You see, if the impulse to write is a peculiarly compulsive one, then the pressure to write must surely become so, too. I don’t know any writer who feels as though they shouldn’t be doing more of it, that perhaps their output is weak or deficient compared to someone else’s – if only they had more time, more money, more support, more something.

I return again to social media, where authors post their word counts, their book deals, their publication-day teasers. I think of the names I see over and over, the enterprising few whose novels appear on #BookTok and best-of lists, whose faces appear in all the photos: Here I am with other writers, proper writers who are not you.

I could just about cry.

There’s a narrative surrounding the praxis of writing that goes something like this: if you want it badly enough, you’ll make it happen. You’ll wake up every day at 5.00 am and write before you head to the gym. You’ll squeeze it in around your baby’s naps, your casual shifts at a bookstore. You’ll join writers’ groups, attend writing bootcamps, apply to writers’ retreats and fellowships. That narrative rarely takes into account the burn-out so many aspiring and established artists are vulnerable to. I’m convinced – but yet to confirm via rigorous research – that writing, for many people, is incompatible with full-time work, with caring duties, with chronic illness.

‘Behind every great author,’ I once read somebody quip on Twitter, ‘is a spouse earning six figures in STEM.’

I laughed then immediately felt terrible.

I’VE BEEN WRITING THIS USELESS, meandering post for a couple of weeks, and I don’t know where or how to end it.

I guess I was hoping, when I started, for an organic ending, a pleasing narrative arc: Ah. I’ve found my voice once more. This doesn’t feel stupid. The language has returned. Here’s how I did it.

But I’ve spent the last few days sleeping, almost without ceasing. I cannot seem to un-tire myself, to re-energise. The emptiness remains.

Yesterday I submitted an essay to that prize, just for the sake of it, the same essay I entered last year but edited as heavily and judiciously as I could manage on my own in the space of a day. I couldn’t bear to show it to the friends who kindly volunteered as a second and third pair of eyes. I hung out a load of washing and rescued a collection of Joan Didion essays from one of the cats, who was ripping and chewing all the sticky notes that my Patron Saint of Reading Recommendations had generously administered throughout.

I’m back at work today, typing furiously in my car while waiting to see my GP. (I turned up an hour early. Why do I always get appointments wrong?)

For now, this will have to do.

‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself,’ Virginia Woolf famously wrote in A Room of One’s Own.

If it’s good enough for Woolf, it’s good enough for me.