Episode Details

If you’ve had writer’s block — and for all the listeners out there who have ever put pen to paper, chances are a good that you have — there’s no shortage of pithy quotes or “how to” books from famous authors that can help snap you out of it.

“Write what you know,” goes one.

“No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader,” goes another.

As inspiring as some of these aphorisms can be, perhaps our deepest understanding of writer’s block can be gleaned from fictional representations of the commonly experienced phenomena — a meta analysis, if you will, provided by the authors themselves. Because there’s no shortage of those either.

And nobody know’s that better than writer, educator Aaron Colton.

“Writing Through Writer’s Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction” is the title of a new book by Colton, an associate teaching professor and director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Within his authorial debut, Colton offers the first book-length analysis of the archetype of the blocked writer, at once acting as a thorough meditation on literary theory while also providing practical insights into the complex thoughts and feelings of the working writer, novice and veteran alike. In doing so, Colton reframes blockage not as something to be desperately avoided, but as something that could be deputized or even befriended by the aspiring writer.

Colton completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia, and has previously taught at The Georgia Institute of Technology and Duke University. His research focuses on representations of writers and writing in American literature, and his scholarship has appeared in venues including Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, and Pedagogy, as well as in Public Books and Inside Higher Ed.

He also happens to have grown up here in Santa Cruz, so we were extra pleased to welcome a local boy to the show.