A Cure for Writer’s Block

To clarify: I’ve never suffered from it. I don’t mean this as a boast. I’m simply saying that I’ve been too busy writing to not be able to write. I’m always navigating through so many different projects at once—book reviews, essays, poems, and now, blog entries—that I don’t have time to encounter that state of distress I’ve always heard about but have yet to experience. Never. But as a writing teacher, I have my students to contend with, and though in the back of my mind I’m positive that it’s lack of discipline more than anything else, I still have the responsibility to provide some solution by way of advice on how to overcome this “block.”

When I took a workshop with Carolyn Forché many years ago, she suggested, quite simply, free-writing by way of getting the imagination going. She called this revving of the mind’s engine “releasing spillage.” It was the letting go of the weaker, not yet matured material—words, images, clauses, and any other configurations of language in its “green state.” But unlike other instructors who suggested a similar method, Forché actually suggested we save the “spillage.”
It gets better: besides a writing implement and paper, we were to have within reach a pair of scissors and a box. After we exhausted ourselves with drafts of poems, all of those snippets of language that didn’t make their way into the later drafts were to be cut out of the page and stored in the box like a small collection of misplaced dialogue bubbles from cartoon strips. We were to use a more discriminating lens however, when sifting through the rubble of “spillage,” and we were to single out the more promising gems. This way, the next time we could either choose to go through the process of “releasing spillage” all over again, or we could go through our tangible language in a box. Either way we were picking our brains.
Of course, this works better for those who write longhand or who print out text at various stages of drafts. There’s something about that three-dimensional box that makes the possibility of poetry closer to real.
Another former teacher, Maurya Simon, used The Pillow Book of Sei Sh