Topic Block

Can you have writer's block if you haven't even started writing? What if the question is how to begin writing? or where to begin? or what to begin writing about? Whenever this question arises in my mind, my answer is simple: start anywhere. Just think of something, anything, and start writing. This tactic can have surprising results, as evidenced by the author E. L. Doctorow:

Well it can be anything. It can be a voice, an image; it can be a deep moment of personal desperation. For instance, with Ragtime I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall.... Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then; trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another and that's the way the book began, through desperation to those few images.

I also like Anne Lamott's advice:

Start with your childhood.... Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just start getting it down.

I find this helpful in academic writing, too. I just start writing about whatever I find interesting about the subject matter, and before long a topic begins to form. The most important thing, as Anne Lamott points out, is not to worry about how "good" the writing is. I remind myself that I am not committed to the words on the page, that they are changeable and that I have that power. I try to remember that there will be time to revisit it later, to sort the good from the bad and to rewrite if necessary. I repeat my simple mantra, again and again each time my writing begins to slow: just keep writing. just write.