Writing Through Writer's Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction

by Aaron Colton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781685970338
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	10/28/2025
Series:	New American Canon
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	278
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Aaron Colton is associate teaching professor and director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His writing has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Pedagogy, and Praxis, as well as in Public Books and Inside Higher Ed. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction. What We Write About When We Write About Writer’s Block

Chapter One. The MFA: Rewriting Programmatic Dogma with David Foster Wallace and Lucy Ives

Chapter Two. Typecasting: Confounding Ethnic Tokenization with Nam Le and Philip Roth

Chapter Three. Public Image, Personal Brand, and Compositional Control: Overcoming Perfectionism with Sheila Heti and Salvador Plascencia

Chapter Four. Beyond Writer’s Block: Exchanging Blocked Writers and Blocked Painters with Ben Lerner and Bernard Malamud

Coda. The Case for Bridging Literary Studies and Writing Studies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“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

From the Publisher