Writer's Block and How to Use It, by Victoria Nelson

Writer's block, argues Victoria Nelson in her book Writer's Block and How to Use It can be healthy. Writer's block exists as an instinctive reaction to an attempt at self-falsification, she writes, and it comes in many forms: daydreaming unrealistic fantasies, excessive note taking, obsessive rewriting, excessive self-criticism, focusing on endless potentials, etc.

How to overcome writer's block? Give the unconscious aspect of oneself room to write. Don't force it to write, tell it when to write, criticize or label its writing. Treat it like a child: what makes a child happy, what motivates a child, what is the child skillful at translates into what makes one happy about writing, what motivates one to write, where do one's skills in writing lay?

Treat this child poorly and it will refuse to write, blocking you from making foolish writing attempts, holding unrealistic aspirations, and, ultimately, entering into an unhealthy, stultifying relationship with your writing. While the unconscious is the ultimate creative force behind the writing, it is also the safety valve preventing "self-falsification."

So what ideas for writing themes or topics did I get from this book (assuming I'm not too petrified by writer's block to write anything!)…. Well, maybe I am a little blocked right now; so let's steal from Nelson:

• Writer's Retreat Block: Nelson provides an excellent example of this made into a movie: The Shining, about a writer driven crazy by his writer's block one winter in a mountain lodge.
  
  
• Puer aeternus: Nelson describes Robert Musil's main character in Man Without Qualities as a classic puer aeternus (enternal child), unwilling to take the first step down any path that will lead to his future. This book, Man Without Qualities, is on the reading shelf in Chapter 12 (Fancy Stuff).
  
  
• Prodigal Talent: Nelson gives the example of Milan Kundera, a Czech writer, who uses the fictional account of a teenage poet to provide an example of the "self-imprisonment of precocious talent" in his work Life Is Elsewhere.

Nelson's work is a thorough evaluation of the kinds, and causes, of writer's block. Not a book to beat oneself over the head with; but, a book worth keeping close to remind oneself how keep one's inner writing child handy (and happy) willing to write creative fiction always.

On Love, by Stendhal

Stendhal's On Love, is a wealth and of delights and prejudices (to steal a phrase from James Beard) on, of course, love and people who love each other. What ideas did I get for stories to write about from his work?

• Story of Hope: a lover dreams of the one he wants instead of accepting life with the one he has. This is a fairly common plot, but it still makes a good story.
  
  
• Romantic Soul: who "walks with loved ones at midnight in a lonely wood." There must be some twist to this conceit that would make an interesting story. Maybe the protagonist travels through the woods to spy on his loved one, or maybe his loved one is dead and buried in a grove of trees, etc.
  
  
• Crystallization: Stendhal writes that the best times to write about love is before it is consummated or after it falls apart. Of course, it could be interesting to write about love once it's consummated, illicitly, and then tearing apart families and relationships and destroying nations.
  
  
• "Jealousy is the last degree of impotent rage and self-contempt which a heart can bear without breaking": Stories of jealous men and women are certainly popular (the movie Basic Instinct). This vein of story telling is not yet worn out!

Stendhal also write about the particular loves of individual cultures, including the culture in Florence, which, according to Stendhal is a society where people's attentions move slowly between subjects (because they are always mentally concentrating on their love passions), everyone is in love and publicly so, no one reads, there no ridicule, and there is much petty pride ("patriotism of the antechamber," he calls it. Such prideful notions as our town painter or our family sculptor). This reminds me of Truman Capote's "Music for Chameleons," where he describes a society where people don't read, fall in love easily, play records that attract chameleons from outdoors, etc.

Here are three longer excerpts to provide an example of his writing (and further ideas for stories):

"A princess of thirty-five, with nothing to do and dogged by the need of action, of intrigue, etc. etc., discontented with a lukewarm lover and yet unable to hope to sow the seeds of another love, with no use to make of the energy which is consuming her, with no other distraction than fits of black humor, can very well find an occupation, that is to say of pleasure, and a life's work, in accomplishing the misfortune of a true passion--passion which someone has to insolence to feel for another than herself, while her own lover falls to sleep at her side." Page 89

"Haughty women disguise their jealousy from pride. They will spend long and dreary evenings in silence with the man whom they adore, and whom they tremble to lose, making themselves consciously disagreeable in his eyes. This must be one of the greatest possible tortures, and is certainly one of the most fruitful sources of unhappiness in love." Page 100

"In passion-love satisfaction, if I can call it such, is often only to be won by piquing the love one's self-esteem. Then, in appearance, the lover realizes all that can be desired; complains would be ridiculous and seem senseless. He cannot speak of his misfortune, and yet how constantly he knows and feels its prick." Page 103

In the third section of his work, Stendhal throws together various ideas and observations regarding love:

• #19: "There is a delicious pleasure in clasping in you’re arms a woman who has wronged you grievously, who has been your bitter enemy for many a day, and is ready to be so again." How many times did Hitchcock use this conceit in his films? What about James Bond?
  
  
• #30: "A respectable woman is in the country and passes an hour in the hot-house with her gardener." The reactions of people are varied: some are offended, some refuse to believe. This idea is rich with story possibilities.
  
  
• #37: "Woman with a heart, if you wish to know whether the man you adore loves you with passion-love, study your lover's early youth." What a story it would be to meld the lives of two people when they were young into the love they have for each other when they are older (or the way their youths set them up to fight each other forever).
  
  
• #40: "No doubt about it--'tis a form of madness to expose oneself to passion-love. In some cases, however, the cure works too energetically…. At Boston, a girl can be left perfectly safely alone with a handsome stranger--in all probability she's thinking of nothing but her marriage settlement." This may be a little harsh regarding Americans, but a love story involving a pre-nuptial agreement, and maybe how easily both parties accepted the agreement at first, and then, in later years, grew apart in ways they never suspected, could be an interesting story of loss and loneliness.
  
  
• #129: "A woman is in despair at the death of her lover, who has been killed in the wars--of course she means to follows him. Now first make quite sure that it is not the best thing for her to do: then, if you decide it is not, attack her on the side of a very primitive habit of the human kind--the desire to survive." This could make an interesting, and moving, story. By attack, I think Stendhal meant to develop the conflict of the story around her will to survive. This quote is also an interesting insight into Stendhal's way of developing story plot--produce a character, and then see how she would react to the circumstances of the story.

Stendhal's classic is fun to read and full of ideas for things to write about. Which would be expected. Love, of course, is one of the universal truths that William Faulkner mentioned in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech as being always worth writing about. Stendhal demonstrates how plentiful, varied and interesting stories about love are.