Writer's Block

writer's block (1)

A conversation with Anne Stevenson from The Silent Woman:

p. 107
"... Almost every writer I know has severe depressions."
"... It's when you know you are not fulfilling yourself, when you know you're letting yourself down. To be an artist you have to grant a certain authority to yourself. The critical world wants to deprive you of this authority."

Janet Malcolm 1994 Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet

writer's block (2)

From The Silent Woman

p. 114
"Leafing through the Olwyn-Anne correspondence, I have the sense of being in the company of an old and all too familiar presence, and suddenly, in an intuitive flash, I know what it is. I recognize Olwyn as a personification of the force - sometimes called the resistance - that can keep the writer from writing. She is the voice that whispers in your ear and tells you to put down your pen before she knocks it out of your hand. In letter after letter she tells Anne the withering things that writers tell themselves as they try to write. Seen as a dialogue between the writer's inner voices - the one abusive and scornful, the other defensive and plaintive - the Olwyn-Anne correspondence becomes something more than the trace of a quarrel between two women who should never have worked together."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet


 

writer's block (3)

from The Silent Woman

p. 202
"... the house: a depository of bizarre clutter and disorder ... on every surface hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects were piled, as if the place were a secondhand shop into which the contents of ten other seconhand shops had been hurriedly crammed, and over everything there was a film of dust: not ordinary transient dust but dust that itself was overlaid with dust - dust that through the years had acquired almost a kind of objecthood, a sort of immancence."
p. 204
Later... it appeared to me as a kind of monstrous allegory of truth. This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its mutliplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless - as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind ...
The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I had wanted to flee from Thomas's house. But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous ... throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in ...  The fear that I felt in Thomas's house is a cousin of the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm