Writer's (sun)block - by Lu Hersey

 I'm finding high summer a very difficult time to write. It's not as if I don't have the time, and the days are wonderfully long. But that's part of the problem. Instead of knuckling down, sitting in front of the laptop, I'm idly gazing at the garden and wishing it either had a swimming pool or could be transported to Cornwall for the summer. My laptop has become somewhere to look on Rightmove for houses by the sea, find exotic beach holidays, or to research garden water features (none of which I can afford, but that's not the point). Some writers call this 'writer's block'. In my case, it's more like writer's sunblock.

My garden swimming pool

If you're suffering from a similar inability to focus on your writing when it's nice outside, stop looking at the possibility of AI writing the damn book for you (yes, I've also researched that 😎) and give yourself a break. It might be raining tomorrow.

Many famous writers have voiced their opinions on the subject of writer's block. Here's what acerbic writer and journalist Auberon Waugh had to say:

"In my experience, novelists and others who complain of a mysterious disease called Writer's Block should be treated with suspicion. This inexplicable failure to write anything can be the result of two conditions - simple laziness or having nothing to say... one only needs to develop a certain power of concentration and have something to say."

Laziness? Pfft. I prefer 'thinking time'. Even if that's simply thinking about driving to the beach... and if I have something to say, why not say it later?

Toni Morrison was more enigmatic. "I tell my students there is no such thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now."

Damn right Toni. I haven't got it right now. What I do have is a desire to go to swimming. Sometimes you've just got to live it rather than write it...

Neil Gaiman, whose output is so stunning, imaginative and prolific (just thinking about it is enough to give you writer's block) says:

"I don't believe in 'writer's block'. I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress."

Admittedly that's one way to get around it, Neil. Have a multitude of ideas and things you could be working on. Actually I have several ideas I could go back to... but then there are millions of other books out there for people to read, so why bother? Mine can all wait until the weather changes.

Philip Pullman is more pragmatic. "All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block and doctor's don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expect sympathy for it?"

Thing is, Philip, pipes need unblocking and people need curing. Books don't really need to be written, do they? But I see your point... 

Lastly, here's Chuck Palahniuk on the subject (you may need a content warning for this one, but it's one of my favourites): "Do you ever go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet when you don't need to take a shit? Do you ever just sit there completely empty and sit there and push? No you don't. You go eat something and them you live your life and what happens, happens. It's the same thing with writing. If I don't have an idea I'm terrified of losing, then I don't bother to write."

So I'm with Chuck. Right now, there's nothing in my head I'm terrified of losing. If that's how you feel too, just eat and live your life. Go out and enjoy your writer's sunblock. It's nearly summer solstice, so the days will be getting shorter soon enough...

My garden water feature. Not quite what I imagined, but it was a mere £17.99 online...

Lu Hersey

But, said Alice, where does that quotation come from? - Clémentine Beauvais

This is an abridged translation of a blog post I originally wrote in French.

It's probably the most-quoted Lewis Carroll quotation on French social media.

Except it's not by Lewis Carroll. 

Today, the strange story of the apocryphal Lewis Carroll quotation that enthralled the Francosphere.

It all started a few years ago. I can't remember the first time I saw it, nor the second, but I remember that after a while I started to wonder where that Alice in Wonderland quotation that we were seeing everywhere on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest came from. That quotation is generally seen as the following in English:

But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?

I was seeing it everywhere. On French social media, many of my book-loving friends were frantically sharing prettily-decorated versions of the following quotation, in its French and English versions:

Perhaps you have seen it too. I was mildly irritated by this quotation, because - although at the beginning it didn't really occur to me to doubt its authenticity - it didn't seem to me very Carrollian in spirit. Too lovely for Carroll, really - a bit bland, a bit twee, a bit platitudinal. I kept thinking 'God, out of ALL the possible Carroll quotations, why pick this one?'

Gradually, I started to seriously wonder if it had been taken out of context. So I went back to the books and, of course, couldn't find it anywhere. An email to the Lewis Carroll Society of North America confirmed my guess: that sentence doesn't exist in the Carroll canon.

So where had it come from? I did a little bit of research, which I'm not claiming at all is valid (I have no experience in researching that kind of thing), but I've come up with 2 hypotheses:

1) The quotation was probably invented by a francophone person.

Let's call him Louis Carole (though, judging by the gender imbalance in the bookosphere, it was more probably a Louise Carole).

I'm not 100% sure of that, but when you look for that quotation, there are more francophone links than anglophone ones; and many of the anglophone ones link back to francophone pages. The quotation is virtually unknown in Spanish (one occurrence, linked to a French page). 

So my theory is that the quotation was invented by a bored Francophone.

2) It probably emerged on the Francosphere around 2000-2001.

At least, the oldest traces I can find on Google of that sentence are from 2001. It arrives much later on the Anglosphere: one tiny mention in 2002, then a few more in 2005, but until 2013 it is fairly rare. In the past few years, it's risen in popularity hugely on both sides. 

But where does it come from?

No precise idea, I'm afraid. I would theorise that Louise Carole got inspired by a mixture of different Carroll-related things. The closest we get to it in the Carroll canon is this extract: 

‘If there’s no meaning in it,’ said the King, ‘that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any. And yet I don’t know,’ he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee, and looking at them with one eye; ‘I seem to see some meaning in them, after all. “—said I could not swim—” you can’t swim, can you?’ he added, turning to the Knave.

As you can see, it says exactly the opposite to what the apocryphal quotation states, but it may be a case of misremembering. Otherwise, the closest in the 'extended canon' would be the Disney song 'In a world of my own' - 

But even that charming little song has very little to do, at least as far as its meaning is concerned, with the apocryphal quotation, as it says precisely that, 'in a world of [her] own', 'everything would be nonsense'.

I'm fascinated by the huge success of this quotation, clearly due to its inoffensive celebration of childhood, of the power of imagination, of freedom - in terms that doubtlessly chime with Millennials, although arguably quite foreign to the spirit of Carroll. Amazingly, the quotation has now appeared in at least 2 published books (!) including a very famous French YA novel, and, even more comically, in an article in a major national newspaper in France, advertising the biggest annual children's book fair, whose theme, that year, was... Alice in Wonderland.

I guess we can now consider that quotation to belong itself to the extended Carroll canon. When I mentioned its non-existence on a Facebook thread, someone replied: 'But, said Alice, if that quotation absolutely doesn't exist, what's preventing us from inventing it?'

Clever. 

But I'm not sure Dodgson would have 'liked' that reply...

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer in French and English and a lecturer in Education at the University of York. Her published work in English includes the Sesame Seade mysteries (Hachette, 2013-2015), the Royal Babysitters series (Bloomsbury, 2015-2016), and Piglettes, a translation of her French YA novel Les petites reines (Pushkin Press, July 2017).