Posted on 5/20/2010
By: Kate Messner,
on 3/28/2010
During my recent visit to Highgate Elementary School, a student asked one of those questions that can only come from a fellow writer:
Do you ever get writer's block? There was something about the way she said "writer's block" that made it sound like something you could catch if you got to close to a sniffly author or brainstormed out in the rain, and I kind of liked that... but anyway...
The short answer to her question is: Yes.
I suspected she also wanted to know what to DO about writer's block, though, and that answer is: It depends.
For me at least, there are different kinds of writer's block, and they require different responses.
Disease: Wrong-Story Writer's Block
There are at least five picture book beginnings and four Chapter Ones of longer works living in limbo on my hard drive right now. Most often, I'm a plunge-right-in sort of writer, so when I have an idea that's been brewing for a while, I dive right into writing, and by the end of a chapter or two, I can usually tell if I have something...or not.
I've come to recognize a kind of writer's block that shows up when the story I'm working on isn't True. And I don't mean true, as in accurate or nonfiction-ish. I mean True with a capital T ... true to its own heart and true to the writer I want to be. Sometimes I have ideas that turn out to be the wrong books for me to write. Or ideas that just aren't good enough or substantial enough to warrant a whole book. This happens, and it's okay.
Cure: Put the story away. Start a new one. But keep it, just in case it's not really the wrong story, but the right story at the wrong time for you.
Disease: Right-Story-Wrong-Turn Writer's Block
In this situation, I know I'm working on the right project -- the project that's absolutely calling me to be written -- but somehow, I feel like I've lost my way. Sometimes, this kind of Writer's Block shows up when I need to stop and get to know my characters better. Sometimes, it means that I've done something that's just plain wrong...imposed a plot twist or decision on the book and its characters that doesn't fit. And sometimes, it means that I've been writing without a map for too long and need to step back and do a bit of planning. Either way, I think this kind of block can be useful and keep you from barreling forward and forcing something that won't work.
Cure: Stop for now. (For now are the key words here. Not forever. And hopefully, not even for very long.) Usually, if I step back from what I'm writing and spend some time outside, I get enough perspective to understand why I'm headed down a wrong path. If it's a character issue, I'll leave the formal manuscript to do some journal writing as my character or map out character charts. If it's a wrong turn, I'll backtrack and re-read a part of the manuscript that felt right to identify where I went astray. And if it's an issue of too much writing-without-a-map, I'll stop and outline. This was a turning point for me with the mystery I finished recently, a project that required more formal planning than I'd ever done with a previous book. If you'd like to see the nitty gritty details of all that, you can read about it here, in a post I wrote for a teacher-friend and her student, Tyler, called "Real Authors Don't Plan...Or Do They?"
Disease: I'd-rather-eat-chocolate-and-watch-Glee Writer's Block
(And you can substitute pizza and play video games or whatever you'd like here...you know exactly what I mean.)
Cure #1: Eat chocolate and watch Glee.
Really.&nbs
By: Kim Baccellia,
on 10/19/2008
By: Kirsty,
on 6/14/2007
By Kirsty OUP-UK
Yesterday you read an extract from Virginia Smith’s new book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. For today’s post she has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about her work.
OUP: How did you come to write a book on personal hygiene? (more…)
By: Kirsty,
on 6/13/2007
I’m happy to confess here and now that I’m a girl who likes her mascara, and it’s a rare day that I appear in public without it. So, imagine my delight when our new book Clean came along. In it the author, Virginia Smith, explores the development of our obsession with personal hygiene, cosmetics, grooming, and purity. In the first of three posts, I’m happy to present the below short extract from the first chapter of the book.
Dirt is only matter out-of-place and is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Nature does not care what we think, or how we respond, to matter in all its forms. But as a species we do care, very deeply, about our own survival. A dense mass of human history clusters around the belief that dirt is ‘bad’, and that dirt-removal (cleansing) is always ‘good’. The old Anglo-Saxon word ‘clean’ was used in a wide variety of situations: it was often blatantly human-centred or self-serving in a way we might call ‘moral’; but it was also used more objectively as a technical term, to measure or judge material things relative to other things. It was thoroughly comprehensive, and unquestioned.
Preceding all human cultural history however – certainly before any human history of personal hygiene – were billions of years of wholly a-moral species development. The exact date one enters this endless time-line is almost irrelevant; what we are really looking for are the time-spans or periods when things speed up, which in the case of homo sapiens was somewhere between c.100,000-25,0000 BCE, followed by another burst of development after c.5000 BCE. Throughout this long period of animal species development, all of our persistent, over-riding, and highly demanding bio-physical needs were evolving and adapting, and providing the basic infrastructure for the later, very human-centred, psychology, technology and sociology of cleanliness.
It is difficult not to use ancient language when describing the egotistical processes of human physiology – routinely described as 
the ‘fight’ for life – and in particular, our endless battle against poisonous dirt. Much of this battle is carried out below the level of consciousness. Most of the time our old animal bodies are in a constant state of defence and renewal, but we feel or know nothing about it; and the processes are virtually unstoppable. We can no more stop evacuating than we can stop eating or breathing – stale breath, of course, is also an expellation of waste matter. Ancient scientists were strongly focussed on the detailed technology of these supposedly poisonous bodily ‘evacuations’; and modern science also uses similarly careful technical terminology when describing bodily ‘variation’, ‘elimination’, ‘toxicity’ or ‘waste products’. In either language, old or new, inner (and outer) bodily ‘cleansing’ is ultimately connected to the more profound principle of ‘wholesomeness’ within the general system of homeostasis that balances and sustains all bodily functions.
Further extracts from other chapters of Clean can be found on Virginia Smith’s website.
