What Writer’s Block Feels Like
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Nearly every week as I sit down to write this newsletter, I’m gripped with panic—the feeling lasts from a few minutes to half a day, and evaporates only once an idea emerges and I find the words to convey it. Writer’s block is a regular affliction when you do this work for a living, though it could easily affect anyone who just has to write an email or a birthday card—all of us, that is. The sensation is like losing your keys: They are somewhere in the house. I know I left them on the kitchen counter last night, though maybe I forgot them in the car? They exist, in any case! Just not in my pocket, where I need them to be.
If I could come up with an antidote, I would, and happily guzzle it when I needed some bolstering. Instead, it’s useful to read about other creative people who also find their minds regularly going blank. This week, Chelsea Leu has put together a list of books that confront such ruts. “The condition,” she writes, “is like quicksand: The harder you try to dig your way out of it, the more your own lack of inspiration overwhelms you.”
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- American women are at a breaking point
- What to read when you have only half an hour
- The father-son talk I never expected to have
- Rachel Cusk’s lonely experiment
Leu has some great selections, including one of the stranger books I love: Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. This is a book about a man who is torturing himself with his inability to write a book. As a result, he writes a book, the one we’re reading. More precisely, Dyer is trying to put together an academic study of the writer D. H. Lawrence, but is failing miserably to complete the task in any straightforward way. He feels thoroughly stuck, and in this state spends pages describing all the unstructured thoughts he has about Lawrence. What emerges in the end is a portrait of the writer—of Lawrence, but also of Dyer—and a mission statement of sorts about books that approach their subject too methodically. “Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations,” Dyer writes, “and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.” Maybe, as Leu points out, this is helpful advice for escaping the dreaded blankness: Stop trying so hard to make it perfect, and just get writing.
Eight Books to Read If You’re in a Creative Slump
By Chelsea Leu
These books dispense practical advice on managing one’s ambitions—or describe the dread of writer’s block with precision and humor.
What to Read
Berlin, by Jason Lutes
In September 1928, two strangers meet on a train headed into Berlin: Marthe Müller, an artist from Cologne looking for her place in the world, and Kurt Severing, a journalist distraught by the dark political forces rending his beloved city. Lutes began this 580-page graphic novel in 1994 and completed it in 2018, and it’s a meticulously researched, gorgeous panoramic view of the last years of the Weimar Republic. The story focuses most attentively on the lives of ordinary Berliners, including Müller, Severing, and two families warped by the increasing chaos. Certain panels even capture the stray thoughts of city dwellers, which float in balloons above their heads as they ride the trams, attend art class, and bake bread. Throughout, Berlin glitters with American jazz and underground gay clubs, all while Communists clash violently with National Socialists in the streets—one party agitating for workers and revolution, the other seething with noxious anti-Semitism and outrage over Germany’s “humiliation” after World War I. On every page are the tensions of a culture on the brink. — Chelsea Leu
From our list: Eight books that will take you somewhere new
Out Next Week
???? When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz
???? 1974: A Personal History, by Francine Prose
???? Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, by Tiya Miles
Your Weekend Read
An Ode to My Intact Dog
By James Parker
Sonny came to us from India, from the streets of Delhi, and the various ruptures and dislocations involved in getting him to our apartment had left him quivering, volatile, tender, spooked, curved in on himself, Ringo Starr–eyed, a little morbid and damp of soul. He arrived in January, in the glassy blue heart of a Massachusetts winter, and every cold-clarified sound on our street—cough/clunk of a car door closing, sharp tingle of keys—made him jump. My wife said that taking him for a walk in those early days was like tripping on LSD. If we removed his balls (we felt), that would be the end of his personality: He’d curl up and blow away like a dead leaf.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Explore all of our newsletters.