Art Journal 013: Writer's Block

This week I’d like to talk about an abstract concept, one which is often spoken of but hard to define and even harder to measure or quantify.  It’s an inseparable part of the creative process known as either Artist’s or Writer’s Block and it’s been the accused in the deaths of many creative ventures, but few people actually define it beyond claiming that they have it, so I’m going to attempt to explore it as best I can.  This is going to be a fairly stern article, so before I start, I’d like to make one important point:

Writer’s Block doesn’t exist.

But how can that be, you might wonder, if you just went through all that opening bit about how inseparable it was, how can you say it doesn’t exist?  Well, to be direct Writer’s Block isn’t a “thing” in and of itself but it’s a word we apply to a set of symptoms of deeper, more complicated issues which all link together, so while I use the term Writer’s Block for sake of simplicity and familiarity I want to establish upfront that it is not a single condition you can be afflicted with.  Writer’s Block doesn’t exist, but here’s how it works:

The act of writing (as we covered in a three-part series) is an organic and messy process where your brain thinks up pictures or strings of events while simultaneously, through the vessel of your body, condensing those wild ideas into a tangible, physical state.  It’s a bit like quantum theory in that the ideas in your brain are infinite in their potential until observed, at which point they condense into a singular state of being; the act of turning your quantum ideas into a stable, measured concept is parallel to the function of observing the infinite and stabilizing it into reality.  If that sounds insanely complicated, well, you’re a creator!  This is the incredible thing you’re capable of.

But since we’re human beings, and thus we’re imperfect, the observed and realized ideas we produce don’t always match the infinite vision we see in our heads- and this applies for drawing as well as writing, or all creative endeavors for that matter.  What we produce isn’t necessarily how we saw it in our heads, and the gap between the Platonic Real and Ideal can only be closed so much and never truly bridged, so part of our job as creators is to take what we stabilize and weave it into our broader body of work.  We take what we get and try to fit it into our stories, or try to draw what we see in our minds.  We’re adapting and improvising and fitting these weird quantum pieces together into something which, while static and inanimate still manages to convey a lively and energetic story to an observer who has no possible way of perceiving the unique, infinite potential in your mind.  And this is where Writer’s Block comes into the picture.

If I had to define Writer’s Block, I would call it “the act of writing without producing immediately-useful results”.  As long as you are thinking, as long as you’re measuring, as long as you’re observing and realizing the infinite potential of your imagination you are writing.  If you’re not doing then you’re simply not writing, and if you’re not motivated to push through a lot of bad ideas and explore your medium to find your voice you might not be a writer to begin with, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that a writer writes and if you’re not writing you’re stretching the definition of a writer.  So as long as you’re trying and you’re shaping your ideas, even if they don’t immediately work how you need them to, you’re writing.  You don’t have Writer’s Block, you’re performing the basic function of your job as a writer, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.  Sometimes the pieces don’t click, a detail eludes you or you’re missing that *something* to make your story work, but being a creator isn’t just about the destination, it’s about the journey you take in getting there, and oftentimes that journey has impasses and obstacles.  Your job as a creator is to overcome these problems, to hash out a solution or, sometimes, a -compromise- to keep the ball rolling.

So how do we overcome these obstacles?  When faced with a bottomless chasm or a sheer narrative cliff face how do we keep our story moving forward?  Or if it’s an art problem, how do we set ourselves on the right track to achieve the visual realization we’re after?  The techniques differ from person to person but whenever I’m faced with a Block I first fight against it in stubborn futility (if we’re being completely honest here) and then, after I’m sick of wasting time on a dead end, I’ll take it back to basics.  

If it’s a writing issue I’ll step back from my comic production run and look at my thumbnails.  I’ll look at my overall story structure, I’ll check my waypoints and say, okay, where am I going, and how will that get me where I want to be?  It might be the case that I’m not on the right path, that I needed to take a different narrative route but, thanks to the post-a-page nature of webcomics, it’s too late to go back and change what I’ve already done.  So if I identify my broader problem as “not going where I need to go”, I’ll then take a step more specific and work out how I can get back on the right track.  How do I get myself from broken vector A to ideal vector B, which is meant to bridge points C and D?  Like getting lost on the backroads my first task is figuring out how to get to a main road from where I am.  I don’t worry about the ideals of where I’d like to be, I’ll focus on what I’d already written, what context I’ve created, take what I’ve established and find my true bearings, and from there I can pinpoint where the main road is and make my way out of the woods and back into the bright light of where I need to be.  And it’s only once I’ve connected the dots and gone from lost point E to on-ramp point F will I start to figure out how to go from present-point F to waypoint D, which was my original destination to begin with.  So I’ll stop, I’ll go back to the storyboard, I’ll see where I’m coming from and where I wanted to go and compare that to where I actually am now, and then find a narrative path back to the route I ought to be taking and once I reconnect with that path figure out how to carry on towards my destination.  Take it back to basics and work towards specifics again, that’s how I handle a writing hiccup.

Drawing troubles can be a bit trickier for me, and this is often where the above-mentioned stubborn futility of mine comes in.  Usually a writing problem I can recognize early on and start correcting, but like a gambler’s folly I’ve invested so much time into making what I have work that I couldn’t bear to scrap it and start over so there -must- be a way to get it to look how I want it to and if I just keep pushing I’m bound to find it!!  This never actually works out for me and once I remember that, again, it’s back to the basics.  I might be having a hard time finding the right camera angles or the right pacing for my comic pages, and often for me the culprit of an art hiccup is I stupidly set myself on drawing the panels one certain way and I try to pound the square peg artwork into a round hole narrative.  Like a writing problem I’ll take my page back to the drawing board and start with a fresh thumbnail.  I’ll draw a little rectangle representing the shape of my page and begin dividing it up into rows and subdividing those rows into either multiple panels or long-wides and start blocking in where my key events are, trying out camera angles in the rapid little micro-world of a thumbnail.  I’m going to forget about what I already drew because here’s the hard, bitter reality of art hurdles:  sometimes the answer is what you’ve drawn so far isn’t working and you have to get rid of it.  All of it.  You’re gonna have to do it again, because you can’t reach into your drawing and rotate your figure or move the camera and have the perspective of your panel change with it.  You have to throw it out and start fresh, establish new panels, new pacing and new camera angles and leave the gravitational pull of what you already did behind you, it is only preventing you from reaching the celestial place you actually want to be.  This is the hardest thing to accept as an artist because there’s genuine merit to taking a drawing that isn’t working and finding ways to make it work (especially in figure drawing class) but when you’re making a comic your art has to answer to your narrative needs so if what you drew isn’t doing that then tinkering with it won’t help, you gotta sever and move on. And let me tell you, that is really psychologically hard to do, but it’s entirely necessary if you want to overcome whatever is preventing you from moving forward.

Any obstacle can be overcome.  No matter what your creative discipline, if you create and something in the process is stopping you from creating, you can find a way around it.  Whether it’s the aha-moment of discovery, a surgical triple bypass or a begrudging compromise for the sake of moving onto your next more-concrete idea, you can overcome it if you step back, examine what you’re doing and figure out where you want to be.  You don’t want to let yourself blame Writer’s Block, though, because if you can identify an incurable external force which is robbing you of your boundless creative potential it gets very easy to become the sort of person who says, “I’m a writer, but I’ve had Writer’s Block for the past five years”.  In these cases, sadly, you’re not a writer.  You’ve given up and you’ve got a convenient bogeyman to blame.  Writer’s Block doesn’t exist because writers write, that’s what they do.  Creators create.  Solving problems is part of creation, and even if your solutions don’t immediately work yet you’re still working, you’re still creating.  It’s not easy, but that’s why you keep doing it. 

The picture at the top of this article is the current state of the next page of my comic.  I came into this week thinking I can knock it out easy but my plan hit a wall, I couldn’t get my pace or my angles right.  It turns out I committed myself to a stupid panel layout, so I went back to basics, plotted a new one and fleshed it out from start to finish, throwing out a lot of work I’d already done. It’s a bit rougher than normal- since I usually like to do fairly tight pencils- because I’d burned a few days banging my head against the wall and got sick of wasting time so I said “I’ll fix the details in the inks”.  I’m sure this won’t bite me in the ass, certainly not!   I’d have liked to have more of it done by this point in the week but hey, these things happen. You just gotta work through it.