On Writer's Block

This blog updates multiple times a day, usually with new sonnets, occasionally but rarely with a more substantial post of analysis, definition, or simple explanation. The author (hey, that's me!) also writes rather a lot that does not go on this blog, particularly for his peculiar mode of employment. This means that he is well-acquainted with that strange bugbear that alights on all writers at some if not at all times, writer's block. And now, abandoning the third person, I shall write about writer's block as it applies, at least in my experience, to the sonnet.

Despite the profusion of poetry I post here, I have definitely gone through writer's block on this blog. If you're looking for when, look for a decrease in both the quality and the quantity of the sonnets that come up. I assure you you will find it. I find that in relation to sonnets, writer's block particularly manifests itself in the following ways: the inability to find rhymes, the inability to count syllables, the inability to make stresses line up, the inability to find a topic, and the inability to conclude a poem.

The first three categories are all fundamentally similar: the inability to put together the basic building blocks of the sonnet, viz. rhyme and meter. To work myself out of these sorts of blocks, I usually beat my head against a brick wall, by which I do not mean doing actual physical harm to myself but rather simply rewriting the line I'm working on maniacally until it comes out and the problem breaks. Sometimes I simply put the poem down and go do something else. But when I'm being particularly clever, which is rarely, there are two tricks I use. For meter, I start using monosyllables: it's very difficult for monosyllables to get away from you either in syllable count or stress placement, since they don't come in battalions but only as single spies, and they each take their own stress. Sometimes some monosyllables, particularly prepositions, are not too happy about being stressed near more important words, but since this technique ends up with them being surrounded by other monosyllables, the worst that usually happens is a trochaic substitution, which is perfectly fine. These lines tend to trip off the tongue in rhythm like a nursery rhyme, but that's OK; the rhythm is back, and the problem has usually broken. For rhyme, my trick is to screw with the rhyme scheme. Was I doing ABBAABBA? Not anymore. Now it's ABBCACAB! ABCCBA! Whatever works for this current line sense-wise will go there, and the rest will all come out in the wash. This is highly effective earlier in the poem, and still effective later; there's nothing that says your ABBAABBA poem can't end with a couplet, or that an ABABCDCD poem can't have an interwoven sestet. And since it allows you to finish the line you're working on with whatever feels right, it usually breaks the stressful part of writer's block, the inability to get a single line down on paper.

Topic difficulties are common to all types of writing. With sonnets, I find that love (especially unrequited love), the weather, and whatever I happen to be looking at are all particularly easy themes to simply splotch down and let run off on their own. Once the poem gets rolling on that topic, it may switch midway through poetic alchemy; that's perfectly OK. But the great advantage of a formal poetic style like a sonnet is that it actually lends itself very well to certain, well-worn and stereotypical themes. Sure, a sonnet can be about anything; but it can also be about the things sonnets are always about, and there's no crime in that either. Both sides of that equation are freeing when you are faced with writer's block.

As for the last issue; conclusions are hard. If it's a couplet that I'm having trouble with, I will sometimes do as I said to do with rhyme and just change the scheme: EFEFGG can be EFEFEF very easily. If the difficulty is that I have too much to say in too little space, I either go back and edit the preceding 1-4 lines of the poem, or I give up on definitive conclusions for a cheap fallback of uncertainty, which is almost always easy to squeeze into a few lines because it does not require tying up loose ends. I have also been known to change how I was planning to conclude, either making a poem have an unexpected twist or making it not have one I had originally planned. Finally, when both rhyme and sense are being a bother, I try to set myself up with fourteen or twelve syllables left (that is, fill the last line with six or eight syllables and then a piece of punctuation), put an "I" plus a verb at the end of the penultimate line, and rush through the last line to a conclusion that either rhymes with the verb (in a couplet) or with the appropriate previous line (while the verb also rhymes with its line, in a non-couplet situation). And the verb may change as that happens. That's my default way of ending a sonnet, particularly one with a couplet, and it will get you out of a lot of difficult places; even, sometimes, out of writer's block.