Tillie Olsen's Silences, When Writers Don't Write is an absolutely fabulous piece of writing. Olsen completely and vividly describes, explains, and offers solutions to the extremely common, but not so popular problem of writer's block. She mentions several factors that causes a writer to stop writing.
Olsen Reveals the Difficulty of Writing
In the first place Olsen states that writing an essay, a story, or just about anything can be a frustrating and dreadful task. If the writer experiences writer's block, it can turn into a never ending nightmare. Olsen makes it clear that even the best authors are sometimes hit with a case of writer's block. She writes, "The very great have known such silences - Thomas Hardy, Melville, Rimbaud, Gerard Manley Hopkins." She relates the problem to the average writer, which helps the writer feel she or he is not alone when suffering from writer's block.
Authors like Thomas Hardy experienced long and painful pauses in their writing. Hardy was very unfortunate, and stopped writing novels for thirty years. Although he did write poems, he was unable to express his talent in a novel. Hardy clearly had the ability to write fantastic novels, but he was unable to live up to his potential. About this silence, he wrote: "Less and less shrink the visions then vast in me."
The Causes of Writers Block
In addition to talking about writer's block, Olsen mentions its different forms, and what factors causes someone to stop writing, or never begin to write. She talks about the kind of circumstances that may be present in a person's life - including censorship, imprisonment, skin color, sex, age, illness, and improper education. Olsen gives examples of people who have suffered from these types of silences including Mark Twain, Isaac Babel, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Eliot, Joyce Cary, Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, and Tillie Olsen herself, who has also experienced a period of silence.
In the case of some writers, they are forced to stop writing because of the situation they are in. Both Isaac Babel and Oscar Wilde could not write when hey were imprisoned. Olsen drives the point home that the world will never know what writers who stop writing due to writer’s block could have accomplished or contributed to literature.
The silence that Olsen experienced was a type of silence mainly faced by women. She describes her ordeal best as she writes, "In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work a job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist." When a highly creative person takes on more than she can handle, the result is a waste of talent. In order to write, Olsen needed to maintain a certain state of mind, which she could not achieve due to her hectic lifestyle.
Christine Musser - Christine is a passionate researcher and does not stop the research process until she has exhausted all possibilities. Her research has ...
Join the Conversation