In California: Confronting the Empty Page

By John Skow

A powerful case can be made that in a society heavily mulched with gossip journalism, novelized movies, campaign biographies, airline magazines, the printed bafflegab of lawyers and academics, interviews with pious athletes and pouting ads by misunderstood oil companies, the affliction called writer's block is insufficiently widespread. But no wretch who has ever tried to write anything will be surprised to learn that Nancy Isaac Kuriloff, a therapist who works in Los Angeles and deals with fear of writing, has plenty of clients.

&#quot;We are really talking about peril," Kuriloff says in the living room of her Brentwood apartment. She is an intense, frail-looking, girlish woman of 39 who moves about when she speaks, dashing to the bookshelf to verify a remembered fragment of poetry, changing chairs to find one whose compass bearing on the conversation is exactly right. When she listens, she cocks her head, nods emphatically --"Yes, yes, yes!"--leans forward in sympathy, sits back in surprise and pleasure, claps her hands.

&#quot;Just now she is describing a ghastly scene, the desolate interior landscape of the becalmed writer. This bedeviled soul feels stupid, worthless, paralyzed; he is in a state of panic and isolation; he feels a terrible sense of impending disaster. "And in this situation the Critic is remorseless." That is Kuriloffs central perception: most people who write anything at all must deal, sooner or later, with a hostile, censorious inner voice. It will say, for example, "You must finish, and you don't have enough time." Or "You can't do it, you're no good, and everyone will find out." In Freudian terminology, this voice would be called the superego, but Kuriloff, whose abhorrence of jargon is reassuring to a writer, calls it the Critic. One jargon term she does not use is writer's block; the images it can suggest seem to get in the way of an awareness of the Critic.

&#quot;Kuriloff is a poet who has been published in the Atlantic. But it was the agony of writing scholarly essays as a Ph.D. candidate in education at the University of California at Berkeley that led her to try to help other people. In college she was an expert player of the academic game, a great winner of praise and fellowships. Such accomplishments did not prevent her from feeling, as she once wrote, that each writing assignment was "a blankness, a barrier, a kind of enemy." She bested her enemy often enough to be able to do well as a teacher of writing at Berkeley, U.C.L.A. and Caltech. But she slowly began to transform her English courses into experiments in overcoming fear of writing. By 1975 she was calling herself a writing consultant, though she is not happy with that nondescription. A brief announcement in the Los Angeles Times of a two-part workshop on fear of writing set her phone ringing. Workshop led to workshop. Wounds healed. One woman went directly from a Kuriloff session to a motel, rented a room for the weekend and wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Another set down, miraculously, as it must have seemed to her, "My pen is shaking in my hand. I am about to write."

At any given time Kuriloff has about 30 clients in workshops (at about $85 for four hours) or privately (at $50 an hour). Her techniques, she is quick to admit, are not really original. She uses bits and pieces of philosophy and psychology, as well as the plays of Shakespeare, all of which anyone could assemble for under $30 in a paperback bookstore. To help clients be aware of the censorious Inner Critic, she tells them to keep a "process log" of feelings and frustrations during writing sessions. Get to know the Critic, she says; talk to it. To gain access to the level of the mind just below the conscious, from which ideas and images spring on those magical days when writing goes easily, she has students write nonstop for ten minutes. "Write about stone," she will say. "Don't stop. Don't correct. If you get stuck, write about how it feels to be stuck." A writer is terribly vulnerable as he reaches out to set words to paper. That is when the Critic strikes. And it is when Kuriloff is wonderfully protective. "You're just fine," she'll say. "It's O.K. to let it all come out."

&#quot;When individuals turn up seeking help, there is no 50-minute-hour non sense. A client comes in at 5 p.m. He is a patent attorney who found that he could no longer write legal patents. He knows the law. But he has been sitting in his office from 9 to 12 and 1 to 5 and cannot write. Kuriloff has discovered that he, or his Critic, believes rough drafts are contemptible. Perfect sentence A should lead to perfect sentence B, and so on. She puts him to writing "good garbage -- accent on the second syllable, please" -- and gets him to take his Critic out for a cup of coffee. He leaves her of fice apartment at midnight, still shaky, but after many such sessions he is once again able to write patents.

"A brother and sister in high school show up. They have been having the kind of trouble in class that bright teen-agers have. KuriI -loff tells them a lot of marvelously subversive stuff about schools -- it is like having Batman on your side, the visiting journalist thinks. The most useful Kuriloff point is that Roman numeral outlines are an ab -solutely, positively, guaranteed rot ten and useless way to start writing anything. Teachers like Roman numeral outlines, but teachers can't write. If you have to outline some thing, make a glob in the middle of the paper and put the biggest idea in it. Hang lines from the lines, and so on. "Net lining," she calls it.

A magazine writer appears, 33 years old, female, talented and, as of a few months before, so stuck on a long article about a political personality that she was pre pared to give up her career and possibly her life. "Her Critic had possessed her," Kuriloff explains. "She could achieve no psychic distance from its clacking, scolding voice." Now she is writtng again and even doing short stories.

As Kuriloff talks, the phone rings. She answers, listens, then covers the mouth piece to explain that her caller is a young woman screenwriter who has fled to New York City with a bogged script. The phone conversation goes as follows:

"At this point, stay in your trance state and trust your unconscious." (Pause.) "It'll be all right, and it will even be funny." (Pause.) "But if you get stuck, it's O.K. to call, and we'll work it out."

(Pause.) "I really do. Much of the lan guage is elegant. Much of the exposition is elegant. The problem is the same one Shakespeare faced ..."

And so, soothingly, Kuriloff goes on talking. - By John Skow

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