The Writer’s Unblocking: How to Sabotage your Writing Career
For any aspiring writer, there is an avalanche of articles on how to be a writer with advice like “Write every day”, “Read more”, etc. However just as there are many ways a writer can succeed e.g. reading at Draft, there are other ways writers can metaphorically shoot themselves in the foot. So for this month’s Writers Unblocking we reached out to the Draft community and asked them
What is the one thing a writer can do to self-sabotage their writing career?
Understandably they were trepidatious, being successful writers and all that, however after much convincing here is what they came up with.
Daniel Perry
Though you’ll almost always write alone, don’t let yourself get lonely. Whether you’re just starting out or whether you’ve already published books, what you’re writing can’t help but be in conversation with what others have already written—and if you live in a larger city, especially, you’ll find communities of writers and readers everywhere from continuing education courses, post-secondary programs and writers’ workshops to reading series, book launches, writers-in-residence, public library events, literary magazines, book clubs, independent bookstores and more. So enter into the dialogue! Take courses, apply to conferences, give public readings, attend launches. Every one of these spaces is filled with people like you who, though very often alone with words, are no less interested in exchanging experiences, ideas, feelings—stories. And if you’re a new writer, this is particularly important. Engaging regularly with others who do what you’re doing might not unblock you, per se, but it will at least help you sustain your own writing’s momentum by reminding you that you’re writing to talk to someone; by contrast, avoiding connections with a community of writers and readers is equal to opting out of the conversation, and brings with it the terrible risk that you’ll convince yourself you don’t have anything to say.
Daniel Perry is the author of the short story collections Hamburger (Thistledown, 2016) and Nobody Looks That Young Here (Guernica, 2018). His fiction has been short-listed for the Carter V. Cooper Prize and has appeared in more than 30 publications in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. the Czech Republic. He lives in Toronto, and on Twitter @danielperrysays.
Elyse Friedman
If you want a one-word answer it’s this: Facebook.
Elyse Friedman is a Toronto-based author and screenwriter. Her most recent novel, The Answer to Everything, was published by HarperCollins Canada. Her work has been short-listed for the Trillium Book Award, The Toronto Book Award, the Relit Award, and has won a Gold National Magazine Award for fiction.
Daniel Kincade Renton
A writer can do so, so many things to self-sabotage their career and I am likely proficient at all of them but perhaps the most imaginatively unhealthy or salacious. A constant temptation, however, seems to me to be to act the writer’s life rather than focus on the much less glamorous or entertaining pursuit of actually gluing one’s posterior to a chair with pen and paper or whatnot and performing the actual lonely and painful act of composition. But it is not also true, after all, that in retrospect, when the work is actually published and disseminated, that we remember that struggle the fondest?
Daniel Kincade Renton has been published in Prism international,Hazlitt, CV2, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and The Fish Quill Poetry Boat 2010-2013 anthology. His poem “Sundowning” was shortlisted for the Basil Bunting award in the UK. Daniel hosts The Common Reading Series in Toronto while completing a Ph.D on Jacques Derrida, Poetics, and Hypercritical Faith at York University. Milk Teeth, his debut chapbook, was published by Frog Hollow Press in late 2015.
Ronna Bloom
The only way I know for sure to self-sabotage a writing career is not to write.
Ronna Bloom is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Cloudy With A Fire in the Basement (Pedlar Press, 2012), shortlisted for The Relit Award. She has performed with Juno Award winning musician Jayme Stone and has had her poems made into tiny films by Midi Onodera. Ronna is Poet-in-Residence at Mount Sinai Hospital and Poet-in-Community at the University of Toronto where she works with poetry and people. A new book is coming down the pipeline. She can be found on Twitter & Instagram.
Jade Wallace
The Horse That Waits
Two horses were standing in the field.
“Bridie,” said the grey horse to the roan. “Why are you so listless? All you do is eat grass and look sad.” Bridie shook her mane.
“My rider left and I don’t think she will return.”
“So what?” the grey horse said. “I have no rider. That doesn’t stop me from having a nice gallop.”
“Well it’s all right for you,” Bridie replied. “You’re a pleb. I am slow now, without the whip of my rider to inspire me to greater speed. I do not know where to go without her noble reins to guide me.”
“Bridie,” they grey horse sighed. “All this time you spend waiting for a rider is time you could spend practicing your sprints. Also, carrying a rider actually makes you slower.”
“A rider makes you slower,” Bridie said smugly. “A rider makes me exceptional.”
“That is literally not how physics works,” the grey horse said. “A rider increases your weight and decreases your aerodynamic efficiency.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to touch the spark of divinity!” Bridie said, looking a bit rapturous and a bit wistful.
“Maybe not,” the grey horse said. “But I run faster and more often than you do.”
Bridie never saw the wisdom of the grey horse’s words. Instead, her lungs shrivelled up and she became very preoccupied with rolling around on the ground and sulking. A lion took advantage of this and ate her.
Jade Wallace is a Niagara writer currently doing community legal work in Toronto. Jade’s writing has appeared in journals including The Nashwaak Review, Feathertale, Poetry Sz, has been included in multi-author collections including Breakfast in a Day by Death Cookie Soup Press and Pac’N Heat: A Noir Homage to Ms. Pac-Man by AGP Books. Jade also has six chapbooks with Grey Borders Books, most recently The Cosmic Squirrel Is On Your Side and Smiling Drunk Pufferfish, written in collaboration with Terry Trowbridge. Jade eschews any sincere use of social media but can be contacted at j-a-wallace@hotmail.com, as well as by postcards addressed to your nearest dead letter office.
Diana Manole
“Stop writing,” is the first answer that came to my mind.
After The Diviners (1974) was banned from the Lakefield High School English reading list, Margaret Laurence had never written another novel. A.M. Klein had a very successful public and writing career. In the early 1950s, he suffered a mental breakdown, withdrew into silence and a self-imposed exile for the rest of his life. We’ll never know if he had ever written again. Even worse: after he lost his mind, Gogol burnt the second part of Dead Souls.
To me, the question has become: What can a writer do to keep writing and trust his/her work?
As a native Romanian poet and playwright, Diana Manole has published nine collections of poems and plays, won fourteen literary awards, and contributed to numerous national and international anthologies and magazines. Since making Canada her new country, her poetry in English (translated into same with Adam J. Sorkin —or written originally therein) has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, and South Africa. Her poems have also been translated into and published in French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Albanian, while her translations of Canadian poetry were printed in major Romanian magazines. B&W, her bilingual Romanian-English collection of poems, also co-translated with Sorkin, came out in 2015 at Tracus Arte. In September 2016, “Deflowering. English” has been featured on the website of the Canadian Parliament’s Library as Poem of the Month in both English and French (translated by Robert Paquin). Since February 2013, Diana writes and dreams in English!
Maria Meindl
Have I spent too much time writing in journals? Sometimes I think it was a necessary step in building a voice; well, a self. Sometimes I think it was a colossal waste of time.
Maria Meindl is the author of Outside the Box: the Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew from McGill Queens University Press, a story “The Last Judgment” from Found Press and “Rules” an essay in an anthology on death published by Creative Non Fiction. Her essays have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Descant andMusicworks. She has made two radio series for CBC Ideas: Parent Care, and Remembering Polio. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner who teaches movement classes in downtown Toronto. www.bodylanguagejournal.wordpress.com
Don’t forget to meet the writers at the upcoming Draft reading 12.2 happening on Sunday, November 20 at the Flying Pony Cafe. For more details visit check out our Facebook Event post.
Curated by Josh P.