Beating Writer's Block

How to confront the typewriter fearlessly 9:03 a.m.

As every schoolboy knows, writer's block is an affliction every bit as debilitating as ... (Well, as what? Maybe a cup of coffee will help.)

Writer's block is a condition that . . .

(Retrieve paper airplanes, empty wastebasket, reread Playboy centerfold. Remember the writer who set fire to his apartment to avoid meeting a deadline?)

9:25 a.m. (Try to beat the block by leading off with other people's quotes.) "Blocks are simply forms of egotism," said Lawrence Durrell . . .

10:32 a.m. (Maybe this will do it.) What can be done to break writer's block? There are many traditional answers: change of scenery, change of work habits, drop everything and see a James Bond movie. Durrell recommends insulting oneself while shaving and concentrating on unpaid bills. T.S. Eliot broke his block by writing poems in French. (Dabbling in lesser languages removes pressure to perform in mother tongue.) Tom Wolfe, to tally blocked on his first famous article, a story about customized cars for Esquire, wrote a really socko memorandum to his editor on the subject. The editor ran the memo as the article. Wolfe now writes all his articles as memos. (On the other hand he is at least three years late with his current book . . .)

11:09 a.m. Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn thinks he knows the cause of the malady. Says he: "People who have strong needs to love or fight are more prone to writer's block." Most psychiatrists believe that, just as there is no single explanation for murder or theft, there is no one cause for writer's block. But Grotjahn, who discusses the problem in his book Beyond Laughter, believes hostility is the fundamental reason. Writing is an aggressive demand for attention. It can be blocked when a writer projects his anger onto reviewers and readers. "It's the fear of being attacked," says Manhattan Psychoanalyst Walter Stewart, "the fear that you will be treated as contemptuously as you would like to treat everyone else."

In fact, Herman Melville was so wounded by critics that he wrote no fiction at all for 30 years. Says Psychoanalyst Yale Kramer, who is studying Melville's life: "He behaved like a child stubbornly remaining silent in a passive attempt at revenge." But even good reviews can bring on writer's block; they tend to paralyze by awakening great expectations. As Author Cyril Connolly, a part-time blockee, expressed it: "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising."

12:15 p.m. (Word count so far: 385.) Short break for inner movie about receiving Nobel Prize for literature. Psychiatrists call this the "grandiose fantasy." This imaginary acclaim is a neurotic compromise between the real self--scared, limited--and the ideal self--a literary conqueror. Says Manhattan Analyst Donald Kaplan: "The fantasy of playing Carnegie Hall may be so gratifying that you can't manage to practice your scales."

This is not to be confused with what Kaplan calls "the Nobel Prize complex" --a compulsive perfectionism that drives the writer to type the opening line of a book 403 times. Every word has to be as good as Shakespeare or Shaw, or there is no use playing the game at all. A sub-variation, of course, is that it also has to be perfectly typed. Psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, a brilliant but erratic writer on the 1950s, has a scatological interpretation of the first-line problem: the writer smearing the empty page with words is the baby smearing mommy's living room wall with diaper residue. Bergler, much admired for his own literary wall smearing, churned out a dozen popular books on psychiatry, all of them arguing that masochism explained most of human affairs. He could have used a block or two himself.

1:30 p.m. (Time to lapse into coherence.) The opposite of the "first-line" problem is the "last-lap paralysis." One screenwriter wrote two-thirds of a script and made the mistake of showing it to friends, who said it was the greatest property ever to hit Hollywood, thus immobilizing the writer.

Fear of success comes in here. One symptom is short sentences. Fear makes you lose your rhythm and forget how English sentences run. (Bathroom break, check mail.) But psychiatrists know that the plucky writer can pull up his socks and finish everything he begi

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