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Alison wrote with customary flair: > You know, I tend to agree with Alan Garner's > statement (and is that the > same Alan Garner of The Owl Service, Elidor and so > on? a really great > writer: I just bought his latest book for my son, > and it looks amazing. > But everything else seems to be out of print.) Yes, it's the same person. The essays are wonderful. For the record, Garner is a manic depressive who has prolonged and agonising periods of block (to the extent of complete life-paralysis), which is perhaps why I find the fact that he could say "There's no such thing as writer's block, only writer's impatience" rather inspiringly defiant. > I seem to have longer and longer fallows, where I > write absolutely no > poems at all. I've always been fairly relaxed about > them, thinking of > them as refilling, but the most recent one lasted > six months. I've > always thought of them as part of the natural > psychal of things. Yes - I try to see them the same way, but not always successfully. My productivity has been negligible for the past two years, which has been a frequent source of despair and has led to much desperate struggling to find magical sources of "unblocking" (sadly not forthcoming so far). I think it's a combination of "not enough headspace"-type block (the past two years have been pretty chaotic, change-laden and mental-energy-demanding), and increasingly strangulating standards (I don't seem to be willing to let myself "write rubbish" anymore in the hope that something might come of it - ideas I might once have run with are now discarded out of hand). Perhaps my resonance with Garner's statement is an intuitive sense that it's my own frustration / impatience that is keeping me blocked: the demanding product-oriented bit of me tries to impose demands on the creative bit, which then goes obdurately mute. As far as the "professional writers don't get block" stance goes, I don't really relate to this. For me, creative activity (as opposed to the writing I do in my professional life) is more *listening* to something faint and subtle than wilfully generating product, and when I can't hear anything I *really* can't hear anything, and I know it. And to "make something up" to fill in the silence seems an insult to the creative endeavour, which for me is definitely about "telling the truth" at a level that runs below the surface frazzle of the conscious mind. I can't always do it, but I know when I have and when I haven't, and work I produce that doesn't tell the truth at this level always ends up being discarded. Not to mention filling me with self-loathing :-( Cheers, Kona. ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie