Writing, Writer's Block, and the Midnight Disease

There is nothing uglier to a writer than a blank page and the cursor blinking uselessly. To the obsessed, the cursor becomes personified as an enemy, something that in its simple gesture is frustrating and laughing, and it's your own limitations, your own failure that is keeping you from allowing the words to simply fill the page.

Writer's block is the worst because even though so many awful things can happen to a writer--lousy agent, lousy editor, accusations, universal rejections, unanimously negative reviews--but without the foundation of work, without the words on the page there's nothing to get you to that next step where you can even consider publishing and that whole process. 

To a writer the inability to produce is akin to a male pornstar unable to maintain an erection, an old singer unable to hit the same notes, a comedian unable to get a laugh. It becomes a sign of weakness, a lack of virility--somehow you feel like less of a man. For some, a simple change will fix everything: new songs, a new bit, online pharmacy viagra. The same can be said about writers: start a new project, focus on something else, power through the block. In that way, many writers do not believe in writer's block. Michael Chabon (my personal lord and savior) doesn't believe in writer's block. He has a structured life--he will write from a specific time to a specific time almost every day. Some days are better than others, he had said, and he can always go back and edit. 

For others, like Thomas Harris, writing is something of a sickness, a possession that comes upon you, and it has to be dealt with. Jay McInerney had a eight year gap between Model Behavior and The Good Life due to writer's block (and cocaine addiction). In that eight years he put out two non-fiction books that detailed his love of wine (it helped him get off coke from what I hear). And that leads me to another point: Writing fiction is different from writing anything else.

It does not matter if it is a screenplay, a short story or a novel. It's still fiction. In terms of non-fiction writing, a lot of the times it's a matter of research and report--like McInerney and his wine opinions, a journalist and his paper, or myself and this blog. It's an entirely different form of writing. There is, in non-fiction and especially in blogging, much less structure.

Fiction is birthed from a fascination from the writer--from something known too well or not known at all, often an emotional depth that cannot be examined, understood, or appropriately explained in any way other than through the fiction. They create entire worlds from scratch just to explore a piece of themselves. I read a quote from a writer--and I feel unprepared for not having her name and the exact line--but the gist of what she was saying was that if she had any real understanding of herself she wouldn't feel the need to write. And that's what fiction is so much of the time--a form of catharsis, an exorcism. So much of fiction borders the writer's reality that it becomes hard to separate the two. Miles Raymond is Rex Pickett, Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth, Dick Diver is F. Scott Fitzgerald, the narrator of Bright Lights, Big City is Jay McInerney.

Writing, I think, is indeed something of a sickness. The writer needs this thing, whatever it is, to be produced, and it always needs to be perfect. My own writer's block has lasted since April. I have not been able to produce so much as a page since then; a rather unpleasant development as my spells of writer's block never lasted more than, say, ninety days. (As I said, this blog is much less structured and is based on opinions and is something very far from the fiction writer's block. Blogging is even more self-involved than writing fiction; it gives a public venue for the thoughts and concerns of the malignantly narcissistic, not unlike this article or any of the others.)



When I was producing, I produced often. I had a novel out, a nearly three hundred page manuscript that I realized needed to be abandoned, four finished short stories, full outlines for six more, forty some odd pages of a new manuscript and random ideas I jotted down. All of these are organized into three spiral notebooks, kept in excellent condition and almost always within sight. When I would produce a short story, the first draft would happen in a single twelve hour sitting, with other drafts happening over the next weeks and months after. Editing is as important as the writing itself, but without any of the cathartic benefits. However, the writer always needs to feel worthy of the words he produces. And that's the bigger problem.

Many writers whom I've read, and many more whom I know, have a penchant for long writing stretches. My own used to last from ten or eleven until dawn, and in these dramatic nightly sessions, the work seemed more exciting, dangerous and desperate. It seemed as if night was the only time that these words could be produced. But all writers have that one time of day, where the mood strikes like a sudden desire for sex. It's impulsive and all-consuming, and when it's over you're drained and hopefully sated. The frustration the writer feels at their lives and schedules changed by this desire cause swarthy and ephemeral moods and a poor disposition. I've read that "creative people" have a different chemistry and brain function than "non-creative people," and this inability to reconcile themselves with their surroundings and the other people in their lives make these "creative people" so difficult, dark, and seemingly so odd--Plath, Bukowski, etc. It's this desire to appropriately put to words what's in your mind and the frustration that you feel because it's never correct. It's the desperation of every writer. It's what Chabon called the midnight disease.

The midnight disease is the restlessness of a writer. As defined in Chabon's Wonder Boys: "to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime" (5). The midnight disease is a ritual in practice and destructive in result. He goes on: "the nature of the midnight disease, which started as a simple feeling of disconnection from other people, an inability to 'fit in' by no means unique to writers, a sense of envy and of unbridgeable distance like that felt by someone tossing on a restless pillow in a world full of sleepers. Very quickly, though, what happened with the midnight disease was that you began actually to crave this feeling of apartness, to cultivate and even flourish within it. You pushed yourself farther and farther apart until one black day you woke to discover that you yourself had become the chief object of your own hostility" (76). Writing not only births the midnight disease, but eventually becomes a part of the writer. The apartness is the result of the writer. It is effectively profound and damaging but somehow a necessary piece of writing. But what good is the midnight disease without the writing? Writing births the disease and the disease moves the writing. In its revolutions and cycles the writer, in the form of his craft, is meant to thrive, but without the writing, the cycles stops, yet the disease--the apartness, the disconnection remains, only now there's nothing to show for it, you're just a dick. The writing is supposed to be a reward, a means of not only contracting the midnight disease but treating it as well. In that way the chief enemy of writing is the writer's block. If the ego of the writer is constantly at stake, and it is, it is the midnight disease that nurses it, and it is the writer's responsibility to understand and move with/despite it. Writer's block is damaging to the writer, and the only remedy is to continue through and force the symptoms of the disease.

The problem is that without the motivation to write in the first place, the midnight disease might eventually fade too, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. The thing about writer's block is that it cannot last. Either it eventually disperses, like a strip of cloud covering the sun, or the writer simply pushes on. Eventually, the cycle has to start again because the writer does not know how to thrive without it. I think I'll stop here, with a line from Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls: "Asking a writer about his work is like asking a cancer patient the status of his disease."





Next update 1/12/11.

Mark Millar's Nemesis: 1/15/11.