A few months ago, Aaron Sorkin and selected cast members from the Broadway production To Kill a Mockingbird gave a talk at the Google New York office. In the Q&A section, Aaron Sorkin was asked by a Google employee how he manages writer’s block. Here was his answer:
Listen…people ask me if I get writer’s block. Writer’s block is my default position.
Broadway’s To Kill A Mockingbird: “Aaron Sorkin, Jeff Daniels, and More” | Talks at Google
A few days ago I finished reading Stephen King’s wonderful memoir, On Writing:
Published in 2000 after a life-threatening car accident, Stephen King details his relationship with writing, how he started writing, how he believes writing ought to be, and how writing was a part of his rehabilitation. In this he writes:
…stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000. Print.
Combine these quotes together and you get this: “it’s hard to write, that’s how it is, and you should write through it.” If you replace “write” with anything else it works too: “it’s hard to sing, that’s how it is, and you should sing through it”. “It’s hard to make people laugh, that’s how it is, and you should keep telling jokes through it”. “It’s hard to ‘A’, that’s how it is, and you should keep on trucking”.
It’s nothing ground breaking, and I guess it’s obvious, but personally I think it’s nice to hear these things from complete strangers you respect. I wholeheartedly recommend checking out the Google Talk linked above and the book. If you had to choose, I’d choose the book.