In these peculiar moments, I always have the same thought: Why on earth couldn’t I have come up with any of this three weeks ago?

This is the pattern which has structured my writing habits—both creative and academic—for the past several years. I can never write when I ought to. If I carve out free time to work on fiction, it’s almost guaranteed I won’t use it. When I have an essay due, I’ll put in double the amount of effort into my other work so that I have more time to write, only to spend all my hard-won extra hours napping—or else, perversely, vomiting up some manic explosion of poetry, which I would have sold my soul to compose the week before.

Anthony Bourdain once wrote in a Reddit Q&A, “Anybody who whines about writer’s block should be forced to clean squid all day.” I fear I’ve missed my calling as a great calamari chef, because in my experience, writer’s block is an anguish of the acutest kind. It feels to me most like grief—a barrenness characterized by the depth of its longing. This is what I feel for days before every essay, for weeks and months in the midst of every story.

And then—suddenly—inexplicably—inevitably—the floodgates open.

When I try to explain to myself why this is so, this is what I come up with: I can only enjoy writing when it feels like I shouldn’t.

The contrarian in me, as well as the romantic, loves the thrill of guilty pleasure—like I’m doing something daring and risqué by, you know, trying to make my essays good. But once the goal shifts from being good to being done, it becomes much easier, as well as more enjoyable, to achieve the former. Making beauty, or deriving pleasure (two expressions of the same thing), where one shouldn’t: that’s what makes the beauty, brings the pleasure. I do my best work when I shouldn’t.

For some time, I’ve associated writing with desire—a gestating story or essay like a burgeoning crush, with that same mixture of curiosity and imagination employed in its development. It should come as no surprise, then, that Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, with its tight interlacing of narrative and desire, has had a profound effect on the way I experience both. Carson contends that obstacles to desire are the very things which enable it. I think of the odds I have to stack against myself—sleep deprivation, a fast-approaching or past deadline, the sensory overload of Robarts Common—and conclude that this is an accurate reading.

But creation, unlike eros, is (usually) a solitary production; and so it is hard not to feel that, since the obstacles are self-imposed and self-surmounted, the delay is ultimately arbitrary. Probably this is true. I have the deepest admiration for writers who can harness their ability at will. It’s comforting to suppose instead that there’s some internal process at work during the long block, fermentation or fertilization, operating at a level I can’t access. I’m fond of Louise Glück’s notion that “the well is filling up”—fond too of her comments about the pain of writer’s block, collected here. I imagine I have a hundred different egg timers inside my head, all for different things I’ll someday write. When one dings—no matter how inconvenient the moment—the piece just burbles forth, like soup left to simmer to a boil. 

Here, then, are two explanations for my inability to write: as a construction of the obstacles necessary for writing, or as a period of incubation for the work. In either case, “the yearning and failing parts” (to borrow Glück’s language) are inevitable.

So what am I meant to do when I’m not writing?

I often try, and usually fail, to live monastically: waiting silently and somberly for the words to come to me, resisting as best I can the pull of external stimuli. It’s hard to be sure this is the correct approach. Maybe it doesn’t matter how I spend the time before writing; after all, it seems to be the time itself which matters. 

Still, there are things a person can do to make themself feel less wretched. Exercise—take a shower—take a nap—masturbate. When I’m ready, or when the words are, I’ll receive them.

New academic years invariably fill me with near-delusional optimism, which is slowly crushed over the course of the autumn semester. The worsening weather, shorter days, and mounting anxiety over grades compound until, by the solstice, I feel like I’m hobbling toward the finish line. (Second semester is usually better—I love the spring, and no matter how badly I do academically, there’s a relief in knowing the race is almost over.

This year, as we students begin our scholarly katabasis, I tell myself that creation takes time; that writer’s block, though painful, isn’t eternal, and is, indeed, as necessary a part of writing as composition itself.