I have writer's block. It's not crippling, but like a chronic illness, it's something that needs to be managed, and I am at an impasse right now. I've always struggled with writing—I was the kind of writer who spent hours and hours on a single introductory paragraph, unable to move forward until I felt I had each sentence and word in its place. I'm a little better now. I can use some form of note-taking and freewriting to get myself started; I can produce fragments that I later cobble together into coherent thoughts.

Given my struggles with writing and my propensity to procrastinate, it's either ironic or entirely appropriate that I am making a career out of teaching writing courses, preaching the gospel of revision and the writing process. I don't remember ever revising a paper I turned in either in high school or in college. It wasn't until very late in graduate school that I was forced to revise, and writing the dissertation was all the more miserable because I had no idea how to manage such a project. The prospect of having to revise the entire dissertation again and try to turn it into a book was too much, and I never went back.

Part of my current job involves administering a special tutoring service for struggling or "at-risk" writers: students who might otherwise not pass the required writing course. This semester, it turns out that many of these students are "blocked writers"; that is, these aren't students who are necessarily having trouble analyzing evidence or coming up with ideas, they're ones who, for one reason or another, find themselves incapable of producing text, of finishing drafts by the deadline. Because they must complete all four essays to pass the course (and they must pass the course to meet the writing requirement and to graduate), and they can't get partial credit or simply take an "F" on an essay they didn't submit, the stakes are high for these blocked writers, and we try to identify them early and get them partnered up with a tutor. Not surprisingly, these students have a conflicted relationship to writing. It's not simply that they hate writing and would rather do anything else; the problem is that they're deeply invested in it, and deeply invested in their academic success, which makes them deeply anxious about writing badly.

One student came to my attention when his instructor said he turned in an incomplete draft with an e-mail saying he couldn't finish it because he had some singing audition to go to. The apparent non-chalance struck me as a cover-up—easier to justify failure if you say you didn't care enough in the first place. It's a common enough ploy. Another student was more upfront about the problem, writing in a cover letter accompanying his essay that he didn't think he would last much longer in college if he couldn't get over his fear of expressing himself eloquently on paper. It was that word "eloquently" that seemed to speak volumes about the perfectionist tendencies standing between the student and the page.

I'm familiar with these variants of panic and its expression. I started trying to write this post this morning before my class. I was only too happy to abandon it when 11:00 a.m. rolled around and I had to go teach. Walking away from my dissertation, and thus from my research and a traditional academic career, I felt a similar sense of relief.

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