Not Writing Right Now

NOT long ago I wrote a piece published in this magazine identifying different species of so-called writer’s block and offering curative suggestions for each one. This “not long ago” time, however, was pre-pandemic time and, as such, feels eons away. And when my students and writer friends now tell me they cannot write, so much of my advice no longer makes sense.

What can we do in a time when time seems to be all we have? (Of course not all of us have more time right now; some of us have much less of it, depending on what we do to earn our bread. Still, for many of us, Time looms in a new way, unimpeded by novelty, friends, and the usual rituals.) The great gift writers pray for—time to write—seems to threaten us mercilessly when we have too much of it, in the same way that children, when they pray for candy but eat too much of it, collapse into a sugar coma.

Much of my pre-pandemic advice is no longer applicable. Write in a public place, like a coffee shop, to hear the hum of human music, which can help focus your solitary brain onto the page—now, not possible. Travel until you get to a country that speaks another language in order to hear language differently? Not possible. Take a bath: Possible. But perhaps we need more and other remedies.

The dread of time, and the formlessness of time, a dread particularly keen to the writer, now has new gullies and crevasses. Some say that the difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is time management. And yet writers are some of the worst people on the planet at “time management”—in fact most poets would never think to put those two words together into a compound noun.

Those professionally able to bear large quantities of self-imposed solitude—Tibetan lamas or Benedictine monks, say—have years of tradition and training at their disposal. They practice being alone for years under the tutelage of others who have borne solitude, and only when they