Eviscerating 'The Block'

It’s the pernicious, nettling condition that somehow manages to seek out every prolific author, desk worker, and undergraduate.

The next time you occupy the late hours with a lab report or Classics essay, chances are decent that you’ll be struggling with this dorm-study inconvenience.

It would be more of a relief if I were referring to early-stage Adderall dependency; unfortunately, I’m talking about writer’s block—chronic, heart-tremor-triggering, unspeakably discouraging, unpityingly stagnating writer’s block.

It’s the sad reality that George Orwell lucidly described in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in which protagonist Gordon Comstock’s written work has “simply fallen apart into a series of fragments.” There isn’t a student on campus who hasn’t been subjected to this feeling of the “fragmented” creative moment. 

If there were a company dedicated to medically treating writer’s block, demand and revenue would be so high that Robert Greenwald would instinctively be compelled to make a movie condemning the CEO. Alas, everyone is charged with having to come up with his or her own model for overcoming the obstacle. But if you will indulge me, here are my modest proposals:

Three years ago, as a first-year, I would have suggested (and in fact did suggest in the pages of The College Reporter) shooting your laptop with the least legal firearm you could get your hands on. When I was young and stupid, I couldn’t fathom a better form of stress-relief than unloading a Thompson M1928A1 into the empty, uncooperative screen of my MacBook’s Word document. The very thought of it was like poetry in motion: the faintly yellow spark of the splintered hard drive, the almost biological paroxysm of the internal wires, and that worthless “q” key getting capped all the way back to the holy Hell from whence it came.

In hindsight, this isn’t exactly the most cost-effective or harmless approach to overcoming writer’s block. Rumors of ricochet in the dorm room can really kill your chances with women.

Two years ago, I would have earnestly recommended slamming a handle of cheap Albanian Rakia to your jaw while concurrently doing jumping jacks and listening to Cream. For a few months, this actually helped me put the finishing touches on some portfolios and long policy memos. But after that, the method quickly became little more than a drinking game. 

One year ago, I would have just told those suffering from writer’s block to take a quick break by watching the scene from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 in which a reanimated corpse nonchalantly engages in an underwater boxing match with a tiger shark. An ingenious sequence like that could have inspired Richard Poore to build the Salisbury Cathedral.

But now, what helps me survive the nights of blank pages is reminding myself about the story of Solly Zuckerman, a talented British scientist and advisor to Allied bombing campaigns during World War II. After the defeat of Axis powers, he was commissioned to write a magazine piece on the raids against German civilian populations. Following his visit to a post-war Cologne, he was unable to craft a single sentence of his essay. All he could bring himself to write was a possible title, On the Natural History of Destruction, and all he was able to think about was the image of a human finger lying upon the stone wreckage of a German cathedral.

That man had writer’s block because of serious reflection on air raids on innocent civilians. As college kids, we have writer’s block because of sodium deficiency and because we’re upset Parks and Recreation isn’t premiering until mid-season. 

On a reassuring note, at least most of us are never going to have to write our way out of the kind of mental and psychological cordon felt by the likes of Mr. Zuckerman.