There will always be a moment when the journey from conception to creation seems to stall, and the clarity of our goals becomes obscured. Be it analysis paralysis, writer’s block, the paradox of choice, procrastination, burnout, impostor syndrome, or perfectionism, this is a shared experience among us all because virtually everyone, at some point, will face their version of a “wall.” The inertia waves surrounding us become brutal, leaving us questioning our direction and purpose.
Consider Jorge Luis Borges, one of the key writers of the 20th century. Borges was a master of literary economy, adept at blending rich imaginary writings with real narratives.
“‘Why take five hundred pages,’ he asks, ‘to develop an idea whose oral demonstration fits into a few minutes?’
His predilect writing themes were especially those that played on the illusions of our world: the circular repetition of history, the dream within a dream, or the fleeting rhythm of time.
Before venturing into the fictional narratives for which he is best known today, Borges was a poet and essayist. But to become a fiction writer, Borges had to overcome a block of his own. His breakthrough apparently came from a seemingly simple approach to imagining that someone else had already authored the books he yearned to write.
In order to write briefly, Borges’ crucial invention, which was also what allowed him invent himself as a writer, was something that in retrospect was rather simple. What helped him overcome the block that had prevented him, almost until he was forty, from moving from essays to narrative prose was to pretend that the book he wanted to write had already been written, written by someone else, by an unknown invented author, an author from another language, another culture, and then to describe, summarise or review that hypothetical book.
Part of the legend that surrounds Borges is the anecdote that the first, extraordinary, story that he wrote using this formula, ‘The Approach to Almotasim’, when it first appeared in the journal Sur, convinced readers that it was a genuine review of a book by an Indian author.
Italo Calvino (an Italian writer whose works often explored the intersections of fantasy and reality, defying easy classification in a very Borgesian manner) – Why Read the Classics?
In his late 30s, Borges nearly died due to sepsis that set in after a severe head trauma. While recovering, he wanted to test if he still retained some creativity. So, he started to pen Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. This story focuses on Pierre Menard, a fictional 20th-century French writer who undertakes the extraordinary project of writing Cervantes’s masterpiece verbatim.
He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Menard aims to understand and internalize the historical, cultural, and personal context of Miguel de Cervantes to such an extent that Menard could authentically reproduce Don Quixote as if he had conceived it in the 17th century, despite writing it in the 20th century. This task involves learning Spanish as it was spoken and written in Cervantes’s time and immersing himself in the era’s mindset and historical background. In the end,
The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Menard’s Don Quixote seeps hidden meanings because his book is interpreted through the lenses of historical events that happened long after Cervantes died. Also, for Borges, readers create just as much meaning as writers, as context and perceptions play critical roles in a work’s artistic and interpretive value. Readers perceive Don Quixote, written by a French author in the 20th century, in a different manner than Don Quixote, written by a Spaniard in the 17th century.
After completing this story, Borgess was reassured he still possessed imagination, and he continued to experiment more and more with this style of writing that Calvino suggested (” the book he wanted to write had already been written”).
Another story illustrating how Borges played with this technique is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Here, the narrator and his friend discover a mysterious and seemingly fictional country named Uqbar in an encyclopedia. This discovery leads them to a philosophical and literary investigation that uncovers the existence of Tlön. This world is part of a vast and elaborate fictional universe created by a secretive group of intellectuals with unique languages, physics, and philosophies fundamentally different from our world’s. The people of Tlön perceive the world primarily through abstractions and intellectual constructs, lacking the focus on physical objects. This leads to a reality shaped by the mind and ideas rather than material things. With a delightful wit, in such a world, all people believe the books they wanted to write had already been written. And so,
The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…
Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.
By the age of 55, Borges had lost his sight completely.
I discovered that I was gradually going blind, so there was no specific moment. It came on slowly, like a summer twilight. I was the chief librarian at the National Library and began to discover that I was surrounded by books without letters. Then my friends lost their faces. Then I discovered that there was no one left in the mirror.
Many would have fallen into depression. This was not the case with Borges. He continued to craft stories of remarkable ingenuity. There is no apparent difference in his writing between before and after becoming blind. Borges’s extraordinary memory and imagination became his eyes. Perhaps Borges was most adept at overcoming blindness because he had already spent decades constructing narratives by imagining them as pre-existing, blending the boundaries of real and imagined, the creator and the creations. For Borges, blindness became a narrative device.
Borges’ insight into imagining what we want to create is already created suggests a method of cognitive reframing where we distance ourselves from the emotional resistance to a task. Echoing Borges, Rob Fitzpatrick offers pragmatic advice in his book “The Mom Test”:
I once heard the general life advice that, for unpleasant tasks, you should imagine what you would have someone else do if you were delegating it. Then do that.
Rob Fitzpatrick – The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
By stepping outside ourselves and “reverse engineering” ideas, we can break overthinking, the potential personal biases and fears that cloud judgment that often accompanies the stages of an endeavor.
Sometimes, we ignore simple advice because it is simple. But simplicity cuts through the noise. So, when faced with areas where conventional wisdom or experience doesn’t provide answers, creating a fictional scenario allows us to fill an empty map with possibilities. It is a way to explore those multiple forking paths of uncharted territory without being constrained by current realities or limitations.