How Elizabeth's Writer's Block Ended in a Flash

The brain works to resolve dilemmas outside of awareness.

Barbara: When we last talked about the strange experiences you had while trying to edit the first draft of your memoir, you described the computer screen looking as though it was made of stone, with incised letters. And you could not edit at all. You were stuck in such a complete fog that you didn’t even realize you were experiencing writer’s block. You said that the stone screen was odd but not nearly as odd as what happened next. So, what did happen next?

Elizabeth: I experienced three very bizarre breakthrough events during the writing of my memoir, and this was the first.

In the draft, after describing my mother’s Thanksgiving order, “Don’t say a word!”, I’d wondered why she bothered to warn me, since I almost never spoke up to my parents. So I’d written, “And why the gag order? I never challenged them, at least not directly.”

But one morning, when I reread that line on the computer screen, an image of a phrase in parentheses suddenly popped into my mind: 

Which is totally true — as you know, Barbara. I absolutely need to say what I’m thinking. 

And then, I had the idea to insert these exact words, in the parentheses, immediately after the admission of my passivity. 

I thought, “Should I?”... and then, “Let’s see how it reads,” so I moved to insert it.

“And why the gag order? I never challenged them, at least not directly (and I’m a person who, in all other situations, needs to get in her two cents). A lifetime of bowing to my parents’ impressive self-confidence and  extremely impressive tempers had worn a deep groove. I was as unlikely to confront them as to throw myself under a steamroller, and for the same reason.”

And, as I typed it in, the stone screen turned soft and shimmery, jello-like, iridescent and giggly. And everything could be moved; the text once again became ordinary language. It was just the most astonishing thing, watching this happen. I was stunned. 

And that was it. After that I could edit the manuscript. I could see what didn’t follow and what was missing. But the power of this transformation, the bizarreness of it, gave me the feeling that something was going on in my brain that I couldn’t explain. Something was churning in there. 

Barbara: Yes. for sure. All writing is always “something going on” in the brain. You think with the brain. You feel with the brain. Where do ideas come from? It’s your brain that writes. 

Elizabeth: It was another case of a sentence seeming to have come from nowhere. It was just the way the title of the book and the first line had seemed to fall into my lap, which I described in a previous post.

Barbara: Of course, the reality is that you were working to break through your writer’s block all along. You may not have been conscious of working on it. But day and night, your brain was working away. One of my patients used to refer to this as the backroom computer — when they had computers that took up an entire back room. And then at some point, the brain spit out the answer. 

Elizabeth: As soon as you say that, it seems obvious. I was internally wrestling with this for a long time — for weeks. The impulse to stick in the phrase didn’t come from the stars but from those weeks of effort to solve the problem. 

Barbara: That’s how creativity works. And it does feel like magic because you really don’t have much access to what’s going on in your brain. For instance, if you reflect on it, most of the time you don’t know what you are going to say until you speak. Your words just come out before you are even aware of having had the thought that preceded it. 

Truly, when you sit down at the computer to write, for example, isn’t it more accurate to say that you might start out with a general idea in mind, but you discover what you really want to say by writing? And by editing — unless your brain doesn’t let you and keeps you in the dark about why. 

So then, the big question is: why did typing in the remark break the stasis?

Elizabeth: Here’s what I figured out. The remark is a declaration of who I am — a person who needs to speak. So I was inserting the present-day writer-me (who’s a reasonably competent person and pretty assertive) into the Thanksgiving scene where the character-me was hamstrung and speechless. 

In the rest of my life, even today, I can’t stand to be ‘shushed’. Oh my god, you want to make me angry? That’s the way to do it! So it was the insertion of the empowered writer into this scene with the powerless character that was the key. It shattered the wall.

Barbera: The wall between the you from the past and the you in the present …  

Elizabeth: I guess that’s right. When I was stuck in the writing, really it was that I’d gotten stuck in the scene from the past, weird as it sounds. As I explained before, in order to make that opening scene at Thanksgiving come to life I’d been really concentrating on it and trying to remember every detail. Doing that was like revisiting it imaginatively, like being in that room. In my mind, I returned to being that former version of myself, in that former situation with my parents, who were still alive in the scene.

But, when I inhabited that time frame and that room again, I was also paralyzed again, just as I’d always been with my mother. When she said, “Don’t say a word!”, I actually couldn’t say or, in this case, write another word. The power of that imaginative experience was just incredible. But, strange as it sounds, when the present-me showed up, the past instantly returned to being the past. The imaginatively recreated illusion dissolved, like in a cinematic fade. 

Barbara: That certainly was an unusual and astounding experience. 

Elizabeth: And I have so many questions about it. How could the arrival of an imaginary version of me in an imaginative re-creation of the past lead to such a change in the present? It just doesn’t seem possible. Let’s start with that next week!