Writer’s Block:

And now, a few thoughts about . . .

(God, why am I trying to do this? Can’t I put it off till tomorrow? I have nothing original to say. I’m an uninspired, inarticulate, self-deluded wreck. Why can’t I be a normal person doing useful, mentally healthy work such as running a cash register or nailing up two-by-fours or programming computers?)

. . . writing.

Writing about writing might seem curious. Yet so many of you out there clearly are--or are flirting with the idea of becoming--writers yourselves, that I think it’s safe to assume writing itself is a topic of general reading interest. Otherwise, why the proliferation of new volumes proposing to show neophytes how to plot plots, traject character arcs and flush out potential buyers?

In the Los Angeles region, where the entertainment industry famously messes with writers’ minds by doling out breathless sums to a blessed few, the popular hunger to write seems especially aggravated.

Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, for instance, devotes about 75 feet of shelf space to books with such titles as “Writing the Natural Way,” “Daily Exercises for the Writing Life,” “Keys to Good Writing,” “Writing in Flow” and other works meant to hasten the emergence of the writer from the exoskeleton of the pharmaceuticals sales rep or waitress.

Luca Gaetani, coordinator of the intellectual property registry at the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles, reports his organization is registering new movie, television and radio scripts at the rate of almost 40,000 a year--about 150 every workday. These, of course, represent only the finished work of writers sufficiently advanced in their ambitions to know that a writers guild even exists. Thus these scripts probably hint only at the crushing amount of verbiage gestating in manila folders and hard drives around here.

So many people apparently have bought the here’s-how-to-do-it books that a market now exists for works proffering advice on how not to be driven mad by unfecundity, procrastination, self-loathing and other scourges that usually descend on those trying seriously to write.

Writers have hardly been shy about revealing their creative agonies. However, these revelations--akin, you’d almost think, to the crises of faith endured by some medieval saints--used to be of interest only to a smallish population of other committed writers. With writing now an epidemic, information about therapeutic measures to address such afflictions has become practically a public-health issue.

One recent such book, and a good one, is “Writing From the Inside Out,” by Dennis Palumbo. Palumbo is the author of a help column in “Written By,” the magazine of the writers guild. A dozen years ago, he gave up a screenwriting and TV writing career to become a psychotherapist specializing in woe-beset writers.

Possessed of a comforting paunch, graying beard and warm, dark Italian eyes, the 49-year-old Palumbo seems a kindly and forgiving sort and calls himself “a writer’s champion.” Sitting in his sunny shrink’s office four floors above Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, he says, “If you took every writer in L.A. and stuck them on a bus and drove it out of town, what would Mike Ovitz do for a living? What would Wolfgang Petersen direct? Everything would grind to a halt.”

The stated goal of his book is to get writers to develop “a more benign and inclusive approach to accessing their creative gifts.” Specifically, he encourages writers to accept writing as its own reward and to eschew predicating the work on future fame and riches. The latter, he says, is of no help, and may even be injurious to the day-to-day task of “accumulating pages,” not to mention conducive to flinging oneself off a cliff when the fame and riches don’t materialize.

He urges writers to treat their talent as they would a child--in a kindly, rather than a harsh, judgmental and demanding way. He promises them that if they work faithfully over time, they will improve. He bids them, above all, to write from their “authentic selves,” the source of all worthwhile writing. Be patient with yourselves, he tells them; don’t fret over all you don’t know and haven’t experienced because “you are enough.”

Non-writers are to be forgiven if they lose patience with writers and dismiss them as navel-gazing self-dramatizers who sit at desks all day, drinking coffee and moving their wrists and fingers a bit. How hard can that be, they wonder, compared to performing heart surgery or operating an air hammer?

It’s precisely writers’ need to constantly to peer into themselves, however, that makes for the difficulty of their work, Palumbo says. Disdain from others deepens their own inevitable doubts about the legitimacy of what they do.

“We live in a Calvinist culture that values more tangible kinds of activity,” he says. “You can be a writer or artist in Europe and be respected simply for being so, because they feel you contribute to society. Here most artists are made to feel they’re on the outside looking in. But I think they contribute to keeping the culture sane.”

Which, of course, is my sole motivation for writing this.

*

James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com