A friend of mine, a brilliant Austro-libertarian theorist, just wrote me saying she is having writer’s block. Here is my response, advice, to her and all people suffering from this malady:
On curing writer’s block. My main difficulty with this is a perfectionistic hang-up. What I write must be perfect, and, since I’ll never do any such thing, I won’t write at all, I can’t write. So, I use these thoughts to help me:
The NEXT thing I write will be perfect. This one, I’ll just write (and then of course I apply this aphorism to the next one too).
I’ll never write anything perfect, and I never have. But, no one else has either, not even Mises or Rothbard. I’m just an imperfect human being, and will always write imperfectly. So, sue me.
Ok, ok, I’m not going to write anything for publication. I’m just going to set down on paper, nowadays electronically, a bunch of notes instead. And then, after lying to myself about all this, I’m going to edit those notes into a first draft of a paper.
Another hint. Just sit down at the keyboard and let my fingers go, randomly, and I watch what comes up on the screen. Gibberish, of course. Something like this: ;aliserpomkigba’rmkBasdfnfgsgh y?hjghdhyj[kaserpm;pgoijaserpoimg’;mkaser;piomg/;lmsare;ojifsad. I keep going. And, eventually, I let my “fingers do the walking” and sometimes, not always, the gibberish turns into something useful. (Of course, my critics accuse me of writing gibberish like this all the time, but that is another matter.)
When I began my writing career, and suffered from writer’s block, I would just sit there, then at a typewriter (if you don’t know what this is, look it up), and INSIST that I write. I would call myself all sorts of names. Nowadays, when the ideas are just not coming to me, I relax. I’m now more confident. So, I’ll go out for a swim, or a walk, or a bike ride, or watch tv, or play solitaire, or play chess on the computer, or listen to music (Bach, Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi and Beethoven are my favorites). Sometimes, not always, my subconscious, or whatever it is called, comes up with things for me to write when I do this sort of thing, instead of clenching my teeth and demanding of myself that I write something.
Another hint. I’m always in the midst of writing half a dozen things: a book or two, three or four journal articles, an op ed, etc. If nothing is “coming” while I’m trying to do any one thing, I just switch to something else. Then, in the midst of writing that other thing, an idea pops up into my head, and I can approach the first thing with new enthusiasm.
Do you know what Murray Rothbard’s motto for writing was? “Hatred is my muse,” he would often say. Well, I’ve adopted that one too. I read something, something idiotic or hateful, and I become determined to blow that horrid thing out of the water. I can’t rest until I annihilate it (non violently, of course). That gets me going. So, if you can’t write, read the New York Times, or much of anything in the mainstream media, let the hate waft all over you, and then go kick its butt.
I always go to sleep with a pad and pen nearby. Then, when I get an idea in the middle of the night, I write it down. If I don’t, I just keep turning it over and over in my mind, and cannot sleep. I try to write clearly, because I’ve had the experience, next morning, of not being able to decipher what I wrote on this pad the night before.
I hope this will be of help to fellow sufferers from writer’s block.
9:09 pm on March 29, 2017
