Journalism's Cure for Writer's Block; "The Inspiration of the Deadline"

Writer’s block? Does it exist? Do world famous, best-selling authors stare at their writing pad or computer screen while their brain refuses to send forth signals that their fingers can convert into words?

Apparently it does. A publication highly revered by many recently proclaimed that it exists. The Wall Street Journal article includes quotes from, as the WSJ calls them, some of the biggest names in literature, all talking about what they do to escape the dreaded writer’s block.

I came to a conclusion after reading about taking showers, sitting in the dark, changing font sizes on a screen, creating flow charts, and the need to use a specific brand and type of writing instrument, all methods used to escape writer’s block. The authors quoted may indeed suffer through periods of the malady. But I would bet my money on the fact that none of them have a solid background in journalism.

Betty Webb, a retired journalist, and now a successful author, published by the highly respected Poisoned Pen Press, does not suffer the agony of writer’s block. She had this to say on another cyber network, DorothyL.

“Any journalist who told his editor he was ‘blocked’ would have been laughed out of the newsroom -- or fired on the spot. That kind of training carries over to books, too.”

As a former journalist, I can only say “amen” to Betty’s comment.

I covered city hall and wrote feature articles for a goodly part of my newspaper career. I call those my undergraduate years. My last two years in the profession were spent covering and writing about live sporting events. That is were I earned my graduate degrees. It was a life-changing process.

The majority of my city hall reporting was “investigative.” Days or weeks were used to “compose” the story. Feature articles, for the most part, were approached at the same pace. However, two years as a sport writer introduced an entirely new reality.

A sports writer does not have the luxury afforded a novelist who knows the word count should be somewhere north of 70,000 words, and it is at least a year until deadline. In the old days, how much column inches would be devoted to a specific athletic contest were not known ahead of time.

For a neophyte at sport writing, it was a very bone chilling moment to return to the office after a game and hear the guy in the slot yell, “I need ten and a half inches." And the official clock on the wall showed exactly twenty minutes until the pressroom stopped accepting copy.

So how do sports writers do it? How did Grantland Rice compose some of the most elegant writing we know? His famous “four horsemen of the apocalypse” story was published the morning after he covered an afternoon football game between Notre Dame and Army.

The outcome is seldom, if ever, as elegant the prose of Rice, but the path followed by him is very much the same. The good sports writer begins to consider the ultimate story line and thinks his way through it before the opening whistle or horn, during the game where his or her thinking may drastically change as the game progresses, and after the final whistle or horn; all before the fingers begin to type.

This advanced consideration about an outcome not yet known, a path of thinking that may shift often as the “facts of the game” become known, served this former sports writer well during a quarter century of non-fiction writing. It continues to do as I cobble along with the process of creative writing.

I do some of my best “writing” when necessary chores pull me away from the keyboard, doing something like working in the yard. My neighbors probably think I’m nuts, but I have conversations with a nearby tree, an imaginary person, while raking leaves. There are words spoken aloud, by me and for the tree. The same conversation gets repeated several times.

It is creating dialogue; deciding which words, voice tones and inflections best fit the “scene.” And it is the time for working on body movements and facial expressions, reactions to what is said, by me and imagined for the tree, the other person.

The rake, the yard, a nearby rose bush, all can be imagined as something else. In some ways, what I do can be compared to stage blocking, one of the first basic technical functions a director performs when starting a new production. This “stage blocking” becomes the backbone and structure (the “business”) needed to make the scene real, be it a live performance or words in a book.

All this is to say that when my fingers later meet keyboard, there is no writer’s block. It’s simply a matter of typing what is already in my head. What I thought sounded best may be edited when words are seen on the screen, but the first draft is there, and, as they say, “all writing is rewriting.”

I, along with Betty Webb, and I am certain many others, do not suffer from writer’s block. And we owe it to journalism, always a wonderful, but at times, a maddening, and frantic world. It taught us a very valuable concept, one inscribed on a plague that the Arizona Press Women gave Betty who spent 20 years in the profession. The inscription: "The ultimate inspiration is the deadline."