Writer's block | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

William Stafford “There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.”

Anita Mathias — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 09:43:00 +0000

American poet William Stafford offers this advice: “There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.” Stafford says that a writer has to be willing to write the bad poems. By writing them and getting them out of the way, he clears the way for the good poems. Momentum, keep the flow, write […]

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Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night. A description of breaking out of writer’s block

Anita Mathias — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Harriet Vane in the silence of Oxford. Something comes “back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the presence of the struggle for existence…began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, like the great carp from the depths […]

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Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block

Anita Mathias — Tue, 18 May 2010 08:55:00 +0000

Saul Bellow’s autobiographical account of breaking through writers’ block with the creation of Augie March. My first thought was that I must get rid of the hospital novel—it was poisoning my life. And next I recognized that this was not what being a novelist was supposed to have meant. This bitterness of mine was intolerable, it […]

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“Free” writing

Anita Mathias — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:27:00 +0000

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” And that is the way to write–rapidly, without too much of worry, looking over one’s shoulder, worrying what people think, or trying too hard for perfection, which is not perfectly attainable on this earth. And just the act of writing, even writing badly, after a writers’ block provides […]

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Saul Bellow and breaking through a writer’s block. I love this story.

Anita Mathias — Wed, 12 May 2010 09:12:00 +0000

How Saul Bellow Broke Through a Crippling Writer’s Block In 1949, Saul Bellow, thirty-three years old, with two books under his belt (Dangling Man and The Victim), was living in Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship, feeling pressured to produce a third book in line with the modernist minimalism that had ensured the critical success of the first […]

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