My Trade is Mystery

“I once asked Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet for whom there are typically many years between books of poems, how she handled the silence, what I still thought of at the time as writer’s block. ‘That’s not how I think of it,’ she responded, and went on to explain to me how a snake, in order to attack, must first recoil to establish a position from which to attack. As I understood the analogy, the attack is the act of writing, and the period of recoil, of retraction, is many things: reflection, thinking, revision of thought, remembering. ‘You’re not blocked,’ Ellen told me. ‘You’re waiting. You’re paying attention.’ Which is also research. Also, a version of silence, the only sound the sound of a snake breathing, which must be, as sounds go, a soft, a small one.”

—Carl Phillips, My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing