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Writer’s Block as Liminal Space
One of the gifts of age, for me, has been in becoming less didactic, more tolerant… and certainly less prescriptive. And thank goodness for that! But not so very long ago I was telling students, clients, and audiences alike that I didn’t believe in “writer’s block.” I (probably sneeringly) said that it’s what people use as an excuse to give up when the ideas or words won’t flow.
If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that words like those come back to haunt you. Every. Single. Time.
And maybe we do use it as an excuse — but that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. Though I have a slightly different take than I used to on what it does and what it means.
In my novels and my poetry alike, I tend to come back over and over again to the theme of liminal spaces. (My own favorite author, Phil Rickman, uses the liminality inherent in borderlands, both physical and metaphysical, as plot devices and atmospheric backgrounds to great effect; I’m merely taking a page from his myriad books.)
These are spaces between the “what was” and the “what will be.” Liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in some sort of middle stage. It is transitional and transformative; it halts you on the threshold and forces you to take stock, to take a breath, to take a chance.
Think of the physical spaces where we experience liminality: airports and train stations, hotel lobbies, waiting rooms, stairwells and corridors, borders, places of exile. There’s a lot of discomfort inherent in these places — they point to impermanence, insecurity, dread of the unknown. We place doors and thresholds in buildings to close off their liminality, to define our rooms of living. We create rituals and rites of passage for our life transitions to declare new beginnings and give closure to what we are leaving, but we’re all eager to hurry through them. Liminal spaces are places we don’t want to stay — and, in fact, we will often make bad decisions or hasten events in order to ease the fear and discomfort we’re feeling.
Instead of seeing it as an excuse or a curse, it might be helpful to see writer’s block as a liminal space. Something caused us to stop writing — out of ideas, out of time, out of flow, out of inspiration — and we’re finding it difficult to re-enter the…
