Recent fiction is teeming with blocked writers: from John Updike’s Henry Bech to Stephen King’s Paul Sheldon and Mike Noonan. From David Foster Wallace’s Mark Nechtr to the autofictional figures of Jordan Castro, Salvador Plascencia, Nam Le, Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, and Andrew Martin. Writing Through Writer’s Block offers the first book-length analysis of the archetype of the blocked writer. From the scenes of writer’s block enacted in these fictions, we gather pedagogical lessons that are germane to writers of all kinds—creative and academic, advanced and novice—and particularly useful for the growing contingency of faculty whose teaching responsibilities lie in both literature and academic writing.
“In its thorough study of what we write about when we write about writer’s block, this book reveals a new intersection of autofiction and writing theory, bringing to light not only solutions but a new method for studying the geneses of writing.”—Douglas Dowland, author, We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump
“People working in writing studies could learn a lot by thinking about fiction writers as ‘theorists of composition,’ and literary studies could gain a needed urgency by seeing how its work is relevant to the experiences of not only artists and critics but writers in undergraduate composition courses. Colton charts useful new ground.”—Joseph Harris, author, The Work of Teaching Writing: Learning from Fiction, Film, and Drama
