The Four Chief Causes of Writer's Block

 

Too often have I heard this or that writer complain of writer’s block on Canada’s socialist broadcasting corporation, the CBC. How often is too often? I have heard the complaint from there many times; but even once would be too often because writer’s block is an unnecessary evil. Writers who are privileged enough to be condescended to by the CBC to receive an invitation to gripe about how hard it is for them to write, exhibit more angst across the airwaves than Alanis Morissette is able to put into her most neurotic song. “How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out” indeed! Staring at that blank sheet of paper, man, that’s terrifying! Sitting before an empty screen, ma’am, that’s horrific! If writer’s block is a snag, the writer who experiences it should keep the complaint to himself because, as unnecessary as it is, it is too paltry to be pitied. 

The four chief causes of writer’s block are these: being a slave to genre, a slave to current narratives, a slave to inferior input, and a slave to self. 

By writer’s block I do not deign to include the barrier to fulfill the task of finding an entry point to one’s thesis or tale. Entry point blockades ought to be as easy to break through as rain through a puff of smoke or wind through a chain link fence. Neither do I deign to include one’s loss of heart to compose. That is not writer’s block, but rather something serious: depression. This is like ennui due to burnout or a person’s intuition warning him that his life, as it is, lacks meaning. What I take writer’s block to mean in persons complaining of it is the inability to come up with an idea to write about or the impotency to continue an idea already begun. 

The first cause of writer’s block: being a slave to genre. Novels are so much the rage among writers that the pervasive obsession might qualify as a mania. The biography or the history must be set down in the form of a novel, it seems. Why is this? There are two reasons for it: laziness and lust. By writing life and times in the novel format, license to substitute fiction for fact evacuates the responsibility to do thorough research. And by choosing to write a ‘narrative,’ which is the celebrated genre nowadays, the writer has a chance, remote though it undoubtedly is, to be inducted into the snobbiest of clubs and maybe even have his book made into a movie. Hollywood is the wished for solicitor. Lazy writing days and the lust for fame are met together in many a writer in our day, for the desire for a shortcut to fame and wealth is near the bottom of a depraved soul, and our society is an abyss of iniquity. Few writers even know how to develop a novel. Read a recent one at random and see. The wherewithal that it takes to fashion a novel to equal Oliver Twist or even the much briefer Rasselas, has been lost. No one is able to do it. If the best chapter of Melville’s Moby Dick would be as hard to match as our populating the planet Mars, we would sooner occupy the whole solar system as to equal the full scope of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Would-be novelists and novelists in name only continue to peck away at keyboards nonetheless. Creating a chaotic world of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and dueling verb tenses (even award-winning novelists commit these faults) is de rigueur because Booker and Hollywood are so inarticulate that they are often attracted to even that. Staccato and convolution kiss each other like perverted lovers do, and classic novels would cover their dust jackets in shame if they could as freaks of nature are placed beside them on the same shelves. Of course writer’s block will occur when no idea can be formed about how to get through a grammatical labyrinth and still write a novel that will please the ‘right people’ by being grammatically quirky. How much grammatical confusion must be deliberately missed in the editing process is the question, for it is certain that the ‘right people’ want something that is not only hazy, but also something that smacks of sophistication in the grammatical-nihilist sense. It cannot be fun to write with unreasonable dicta hanging over one’s head. These dicta cast a pall over the very soul of an author, and they hang more ominously over the novelist than the writer who has engaged himself to be married to any other genre. A short story will hardly be noticed; yea, a whole collection can blow trumpets according to the number of stories included, and the wall of non-discoverability will not be likely to fall. But to lay that wall flat by a novel, be it retarded by postmodern conventions or not, is so unlikely that writer’s block to prevent the aspirer from scribbling his first sentence is a blessing if it sticks. Why begin to write if you must write as a slave to the conventions of unorthodox composition? Writer’s block is better. Here is how the postmodern sophisticate would write that sentence: “Writer’s. Block. Is. Better.” What a charming way to write when you have no panache to flourish!  

The second cause of writer’s block: being a slave to current narratives. Usually when I turn on CBC radio, I immediately hear a propaganda narrative being disseminated in order to provoke discontent and unrest. Here are some examples that I decided to note down: (1) Monday, November 4, 2024, at around 1455: The first words I heard were these: “The first time I was called a wop….” (2) Friday, November 8, 2024, minutes before 0500 (maybe I meant minutes before 1500): The first words I heard were these: “It’s hard to be a black woman in the presence of white people who can kill you.” This was on a program called ‘Ideas.’ (3) Friday, November 15, 2024, at around 1325: The first words were not revealing; but the subject was testosterone levels in transgender persons who play sports and the alleged discrimination they face. (4) Sunday, January 12, 2025, at around 1350: An educator, after reading her poem, said, “I had a lot of unlearning to do.” This was regarding indigenous rights. Then she went on to opine on climate change. (5) Sunday, February 9, 2025, at 1350: At this time I heard a ‘conversation’ take place between the host and a queer Mexican immigrant to the USA about the queer’s book about being queer. (6) Sunday, March 2, 2025, at 1359: An interview was wrapping up between the host and an author. The author said: “As a gay man, I even have a career.” (7) Just today, June 2, 2025, while getting ready to proof this article, I turned CBC radio on minutes before what they call the ‘news,’ and heard this: “This is what the abusive husband says to his wife.” Whenever you turn on that radio station, you will probably discern, either immediately or before a few minutes have expired, that the topic in hand has something to do with a propaganda narrative. It is the same with Radio Canada (CBC’s French side.)  

Those notes came in handy because what the CBC broadcasts is a snapshot of the larger scene on mainstream media platforms. Racism, the queer agenda, climate change, feminism—these are some of the narratives that writers are pressured to accept and promote during this present epoch in the West. We all know what the rest of the narratives are. They concern abortion, open borders, migrants, Islam, vaccines, irrational Trump hatred, and even the defense of pedophilia via drag queens and dirty books that are thrust before kids in our libraries. The CBC’s newest favorite is the ‘content farm,’ which is their term for any site they don’t like and want to shut down. Writers must walk the narrow line on these narratives and others, or be ostracized, censored, or worse. This tyranny over the mind and conscience is commonly tolerated and abided by in the interest of keeping the way open to being accepted if not celebrated, though the truth is that the conforming writer will barely be discovered unless he knows someone on the inside. Not only are the tyrannical narratives to be obeyed line upon line and precept upon precept as if the word of the devil is the now the word of God; but because they are unlike ‘the sure word of prophecy,’ these demoniacal narratives must be shifted with in synchronicity with the sinister wings of Satan as they dictate the direction of his loathsome winds. So the writer attempts to get his novel up as straightly in line with where the crooked narratives are bending at the moment, and tries to wedge his thesis somewhere in between all of the other theses that are piled on the dunghills of mainstream media, mass market stores, and the brainwashing sites. What helps him to wedge it in is the state of his novel-thesis, which is rotten and mushy and therefore amenable to being forced in there. By the time it is seen, though, if it ever is seen, the narratives have changed a latitude or so from their position vis-à-vis Perdition and a couple of longitudes, maybe, from Gehenna. So now the writer debates within himself about whether he should do a conforming rewrite or start a whole new project in his ongoing quest to please the forces of darkness at the expense of his own liberty to think for himself and to write without having to drag the ball and chain of mutating narratives behind his pen.           

Any person who writes what he thinks has the best chance at being accepted is a mercenary, a hireling, and a slave. Did Augustine write to please the Romans? Read the first half of The City of God, and see. And that book is one of the chief classics, not only of antiquity, but in the whole of history. Instead of dissembling or temporizing, he demolished the gods of Rome by his theology, logic, and historical learning. He wrote what he believed the truth to be. Did Martin Luther write to thrill the papists? Or did he lay everything, including his life, on the line to speak ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 2.16) most freely? He could have come short of risking his life by selling out his lip. He knew what narratives one should repeat; he knew them better than anyone else did, including the pope. Did he toe the line? Or did he give accursed narratives the boot? “For the world paints for itself a god who accepts our good works, and is pleased with the mass, vigils, foundations, rosaries, caps, pates, hempen ropes, and what more be the works of fools with which the Pope is employed” (Martin Luther, Sermons on Gospel Texts, Volume 3.1, p. 342.) The items that he denounces there are just some of the baggage that Roman Catholicism’s narratives make use of. In the same way, instead of composing ‘acceptable’ narratives or steering clear of deriding them, we should, if we disbelieve in them, write honestly and openly about them. It wasn’t easy for Luther to act upon his beliefs: “I could not so quickly come to the point, to cast to the winds the law of the Pope. It was a bitter and difficult task for me to eat meat on Friday, and conclude that the law and order of the Pope amounted to nothing. God help us, how difficult it was for me, before I dared to do it! Therefore one should become free from this in his own conscience….” (Ibid., p. 337.) Luther’s eating meat on Friday might be like our refusing to confess that global warming is a thing and denying that green schemes are environmentally friendly. So many content creators feel such pressure while making their documentaries that they feel obliged to inject an out of context comment on climate change just to save themselves from censorship by the narrative police. It could be a documentary on the Mongols, for example; but right in there out of place is this comment by the narrator about how climate change somehow had something to do with all their marauding. That is narrative tyranny; and it must be denounced and rejected. In increasingly greater numbers, even evangelical Christian writers are complying with narratives that they know are out of sync with Christianity. They want to be in fashion instead of out of favor; they want to make money more than they want to ‘make their calling and election sure.’ They are like the covetous persons condemned by God through the apostle Peter for exploiting buyers through deceptive words (2 Peter 2.3.) Assenting to narratives that are known to be untrue and injurious, especially when one of those narratives is the LGBTQ fetish, puts the writer in the ‘ungodly’ company of those for whom the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an example (verse 6.) If that kind of fraternizing seems wise, it is wisdom that ‘descendeth not from above’ (James 3.15) but comes from the devil and will prove to have not been a good decision ‘at the last day.’ To accommodate what you used to condemn only works well one way: if you were wrong before but now you are right. If you were right before but now you are wrong, well, maybe you are one of those persons who were never ‘of us’ in the first place (1 John 2.19.) In any case, it is better to be a freeman than a slave to someone else’s narratives. How does a writer play hopscotch with imposed narratives, anyway, without ruining the narrative that he has in mind to write? It is enough to give a writer writer’s block. Writer’s block is the result of submitting to slavery.             

The third cause of writer’s block: being a slave to inferior input. It is a fact that what you produce, as well as the quality thereof, largely depends on what you imbibe. It strikes me as paradoxical that the more thorough and meticulous the book is that you read, the more likely it is that ideas will rain down on you concerning the same topic treated in said book. Exhaustive treatment leads to new avenues. Ideas come from a writer causing you to think. This means that to benefit, you must labor to read no faster than the speed that permits you to lay hold of what the author communicates. If you have to stay with a paragraph for awhile in order to grasp it, it is essential that you do this before you move on. The same rule applies to the sentence. Often it is the sentence that you leave behind misunderstood that is, and that might have been for you, the stimulus to new thought and the opener of ideas. Finishing a paragraph, thankfully, will often open that puzzling sentence up to your understanding. If it doesn’t, return to that hard sentence and deal with it. Even the process of cracking the code of a sentence that should never have been written does a lot of good because if you can figure that cryptic sentence out, average sentences will not give you trouble. I thought reading 16th century French was hard work. How about deciphering the likes of this from the same century, originally in Spanish?—: “Never was a thing, which I might suspect of your love, so far from the truth as to give me occasion for not believing my suspicion many times more than your excuse” (Frederick Morris Warren, A History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century, p. 270.) Warren’s history from 1895 is an obsolete criticism of antiquated books. Notwithstanding excerpts like the one above, it has enduring worth because it provokes thought. If a writer reads nothing but what was written yesterday, he will be more enervated than stimulated, and should not be surprised that he has no idea what to write about. 

A common burden among ministers of an earlier age was that so much of their time was consumed by having to write letters. Their quills were busy because instead of indifferently going along with current narratives, they met them head on. So writer’s block, to them, was never a concern. Furthermore, their minds were so enriched by what they read that they had more ideas than they had time to develop. “If any reader expects from the title a fictitious tale, or something partly drawn from my imagination, I fear he will be disappointed. Such writing is not in my province, and I have no leisure for it if it was. Facts, naked facts, and the stern realities of life, absorb all the time that I can spare for the press” (J. C. Ryle, Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, p. 11.) What was Ryle in the habit of reading? He read the works and lives of men that had been used of God to civilize, through the influence of the Spirit and the Gospel, the continent of Europe and the American colonies. With that for his stimulus, he had too much to write about, and had to pick and choose. Do surgeons and welders wring their hands about how they will begin their next job? They don’t have time for that. The one has patients lined up; the other has projects calling for attention. So the one reaches for his scalpel; the other grabs his torch. J. C. Ryle suffered no writer’s block because he was no slave to inferior material as his input.         

The fourth cause of writer’s block: being a slave to self. If a writer isn’t naturally disinterested in what he can gain from writing, he is not really engaging in an honest, thinking way with what matters. If what is happening in the world is not pressing upon him more than his fantasy of being known in literary circles and on interview channels, he should wonder at the propriety of his priorities. You can tell when a writer, even a writer who is engaging confrontationally with destructive narratives, is desperate in his promotion of self. When he is interviewed, he has his book placed strategically on a shelf to his left or his right behind him or he has a poster of it on the wall that all the viewers will see. The writer who does that has his eye on self. When he writes his book, therefore, he must be thinking of what these viewers will get excited by. They call it throwing ‘red meat’ out there for the partisans to devour. And this is why fact-finding books are not as focused and incisive as they should be. Self takes too much room, fact-following not enough. Instead of obsessing about how to get that red meat smelled and devoured, it would be better to make sure that that meat has not been chewed up already because of all the rehashing it has undergone by peers. For example, every writer today seems to think that the Enlightenment was a positive force. They’ve heard other authors say that; and they’ve read it in the up to the minute books that they’ve just finished reading. If they were to dig into the past instead of give automatic credence to present-day replicators of untested narratives, they would discover that the Enlightenment was a downturn, not an ascent. Really, it was an attempted mountain climb without benefit of rope attached to God, and we’ve been in freefall ever since. Not to pick on Julie Ponesse because almost any author from any academy could be chosen, but in her book called My Choice, the Ethical Case against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates, the typical tiresome narrative to combat present-day Western tyrannies is predictably had recourse to: the Enlightenment, with its usual negative change agents: Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant. She, an ethics professor, doesn’t even seem to know that a Freethinker is a person ‘freely’ thinking his own way philosophically, that is, without dependence on theology, religion, or God. If she knew it, she would probably capitalize the word. What happened in the Enlightenment was on this wise: Characters like Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were on the side of the mountain trying to reach Truth. Let’s call that mountain Modern Babel Mountain. The first tossed away the crampons; the second tossed away the chalk; the third tossed away the carabiners; the fourth tossed away the harnesses; the fifth tossed away the ropes; and the freefall began. They are overconfident, falsely educated numbskulls who believe that science was generated or even advanced by the Enlightenment. The Protestant Christian ethos was the gas in the car; the Enlightenment proceeds on the strength of its fumes. It is because we are running on fumes that the car is sputtering today, as we see in the politicization of science, from which ‘politic’ unscientific mandates were imposed on us during the Covid hype; and as we see in the folly of ‘green energy,’ which is more wasteful and inefficient than the 19th century use of the dirtiest coal. Is burying these giant used up wind turbines under good soil a sustainable disposable system? This has been done; you may see it online. You would think that every Freethinking writer by this time in 2025, after mustering the same old Enlightenment narrative for the umpteenth time to combat even worse or ever worsening narratives—narratives that would not even exist except for being spawned by the Enlightenment, by the way—would get a permanent comatose-level writer’s block. To get around writer’s block when they do contract it, they rearrange the same names that were used last time, and then compete with the same audience that is already familiar and in line with the faulty narrative, and continue to be slaves to self. That is, after all, what the Enlightenment is all about: the Pretended Almighty Self.

I took about a one minute listen to what a writer had to say on how to cure writer’s block. His advice was to give yourself permission to write garbage—on the supposition, I suppose, that this would lead to somewhere good or that the garbage could be polished up later. This writer, if he takes his own advice, probably writes garbage.  

To echo the sound wave on the other side of the body of this article, the four chief causes of writer’s block are these: being a slave to genre, a slave to current narratives, a slave to inferior input, and a slave to self. While writer’s block is an unnecessary evil, it is a good thing for a writer to be halted by it until superior input drives him into his proper genre, enables him to do battle victoriously against current narratives, and humbles him enough so that he will no longer be a slave to self while he prosecutes his mission, which mission, hopefully, is a Divine calling looking down on, not up to, the Enlightenment.