porque é que os escritores não escrevem

quando há branco. os escritores são escritores, não se fazem. podem escrever ou não, podem nunca escrever nada e nunca ninguém saber que o são, nem eles, há os que tentam e desistem sem saberem que o são, há os distraídos e os que deixam a enorme massa disforme das contas diárias encher as páginas que eram destinadas a outra coisa. é preciso silêncio. talvez a maior parte deles não pratique o que inequivocamente é por falta de silêncio, uns poucos por indecisão e angústia. angústia mais ou menos calada à força pelo próprio, mas sempre lá.

"Yesterday was my Birth Day,” Coleridge wrote in his notebook in 1804, when he was thirty-two. “So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month.—O Sorrow and Shame. . . . I have done nothing!” It was true. Most of the poems for which he is remembered were written when he was in his mid-twenties. After that, any ambitious writing project inspired in him what he called “an indefinite indescribable Terror,” and he wasted much of the rest of his life on opium addiction. How could he have done this? Why didn’t he pull himself together? A friend asked him the same question. “You bid me rouse myself,” he replied. “Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. Alas! (he would reply) that I cannot move my arms is my complaint.”
(...)
These fastidious Frenchmen, when they described the difficulties of writing, did not talk, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, about a metaphysical problem, or even a psychological problem. To them, the problem was with language: how to get past its vague, cliché-crammed character and arrive at the actual nature of experience. They needed a scalpel, they felt, and they were given a mallet."

parte de um mais que interessante artigo sobre o bloqueio de escritor, no New Yorker, por Joan Acocella.