Maybe It’s All Been Written Before

I believe that one of the things that contributes to writer’s block—perhaps the biggest contributor, come to it—is the notion that it’s all been written before. The first-order thought that sets up the Block for me is the desperate need to write something original. Obviousness bedevils the mind and stills the fingers (or the hand, if you’re old-school). Revving in place is never good for the engine, and the generated heat is a dry heat, the kind that stoppers the mind.

Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy that includes The Golden Compass (née *Northern Lights)* once said to never be afraid of the obvious. I’m (likely not, actually) paraphrasing Pullman, but one should never use quotes unless 100% certain the words were exact.

In the same way I come by many of these things, it was a bit of a discrete journey, made continuous only by my leaping mind. It started with turning on the TV to see that TiVo had dumped quite a few House episodes.

I love this show for various entertainment reasons. Hugh Laurie is the most deserving Emmy winner in recent memory. The show is very smart, but remains accessible. Modesty (aka the only laudable form of lying left) aside (y’all know how I feel about lies), I have enough of a science/biology background that I could do without much of the explanations, in which case the episodes would be 35 minutes long instead of 43, so I’m left with a show that both entertains and leaves me with enough bandwidth (yes, even when you factor in the 2+ year long headache) to think other thoughts.

Blog-writing is a two-dimensional thing, planar. In Euclidean geometry, the primary three elements are the point, the line and the plane. A line is one-dimensional, and requires two points to be defined. A plane is two-dimensional and so requires three points to be defined.

This is what I mean by calling blog-writing planar. Generally there are three points required to generate a blog-entry: two external ones and the one you create yourself.

Back to House. There was an episode on about a teenage boy having kicked into a control freak because he’d had to start taking care of supposedly-schizophrenic mother. He lied about being eighteen, after having hidden it for months and months. Then of course the script went to the obvious: Child Protective Services showed up. They were even so obvious as to pain the agent immediately as evil—not outright mean to the child, just that she treated him like inventory.

But it was what they showed before that caught me: the child would read the same passage from a book of poetry. Thanks to HD and a generous camera angle, I could see the book title: The Wild Swans At Coole by W.B. Yeats. The piece was called “Her Praise”:

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised
I will talk no more of books or the long war
But walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage the talk until her name come round.
If there be rags enough he will know her name
And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,
Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

I’d actually never heard of it before; not surprisingly because I generally don’t go out in search of poetry (Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Comedies excepted, of course).

The cool part of this, to me, was that it could only be fitted loosely to the story. Clearly an homage to his mom, but still obvious (again, not a bad thing).

So on the webpage on Google Book Search there happened to be a list of “popular passages”. One of which caught my eye:

The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

There’s something that frighteningly fitted itself to one of the myriad ways I view the past fifteen years.

And it was the specificity of this poem which presented itself as the second external point, the third point being the terrible in-betweens of the first two and the title of this blog entry.

Writer’s Block is awful. It creates a certain myopia that makes inscrutable and far-away anything outside the perimeter of the blank page in front of you. In times like right now (House and all) it’s easy to see a simple solution to Block: write about the Block!

So when you sit there at a blank page, don’t force anything. Don’t worry if it’s been written before because it probably has.

The salvation is to know and accept it: while it may have been written before, it hasn’t yet been written by YOU.