An ill wind blows
Joan Acocella has written an excellent essay on a subject that most writers are too superstitious to even talk about: writer’s block. In an essay for The New Yorker, Acocella traces the history of writer’s block back to the Romantic era, when “the conception of the art changed. Before, writers regarded what they did as a rational, purposeful activity, which they controlled. By contrast, the early Romantics came to see poetry as something externally, and magically, conferred…. Poetry was the product of ’some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,’ which more or less blew the material into the poet, and he just had to wait for this to happen.” Acocella also examines the many strategies — few of them successful — that writers have used to try to get unblocked, including alcohol, narcotics, various forms of psychotherapy, and, more recently, psychotropic drugs.
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Read The New Yorker essay
