Mark Twain on Writer’s Block: Writers cannot write if their alternate personalities are not “filling up the tank.” This implies you must speak to them.

The following two past posts are not quick fixes, but they might be helpful:

April 29, 2016

Mark Twain’s avowed alternate personality, outside Twain’s awareness, explains how Twain’s books would “write itself” with “unconscious cerebration”  

In yesterday’s post, I quoted from Mark Twain’s notebook, in which he said that he had multiple personality:

“The two persons in a man do not even know each other and are not aware of each other’s existence, never heard of each other—have never even suspected each other’s existence…I am not acquainted with [have no conscious awareness of] my double, my partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me…”

You may wonder what his having an alternate personality—a “wholly independent personage who resides in me,” who does whatever he does, totally out of his regular self’s awareness—has to do with his writing?

The answer is, Everything, according to what he says about how his creative process works, for example:

“As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind…

“…when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work on other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on” (1, p. 196).

Of course, the “unconscious…cerebration” was unconscious only in the sense that his regular self was not conscious of it. But his “partner in duality, the other and wholly independent personage who resides in me” was evidently busy “contriving [the novel’s] situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations,” to fill up the tank from which Mark Twain drew.

1. [Samuel L. Clemens]. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, et al., Editors. A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library. Berkeley Los Angeles London, University of California Press, 2013.

October 21, 2016

Curing Writer’s Block: Implications of Multiple Identity Literary Theory, which holds that writers have and use a normal version of multiple personality.

What is blocked in writer’s block? That which normally goes on in the writer’s mind: a cooperative participation of the writer’s alternate personalities.

Thus, when writer’s block does occur, writers who are familiar with their alternate personalities will know with whom to discuss the problem.

There are two ways to communicate with alternate personalities: talking and writing. When writers talk with their characters, narrators, muses, and other voices, they are talking with their alternate personalities. When writers keep extensive journals, and sometimes find entries responding to their inquiries, expressing alternate views (which, if handwritten, may be in different handwritings), those mysterious entries are from their alternate personalities.

The cooperative participation of alternate personalities might be blocked by anything that causes, in the view of the alternate personality, a hostile work environment. For example, if a particular alternate personality is facilitated by a moderate blood-alcohol level or a mild depression, they may be blocked by excessive drinking or severe depression. Or an alternate personality might have artistic differences, and want to publish independently, under a pseudonym.

Since the possible kinds of complaints are infinite, it is best to ask your alternate personalities what is bothering them. If you think you have spoken to all your alternate personalities, but still have writer’s block, you may have alternate personalities whom you have not yet met. You may, in the words of Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.