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If you want to be a writer, you've probably suffered from writer's block. Consider Henry Roth, to take just one example.

When his novel Call It Sleep was published in 1934, it didn't do well, and Roth gave up writing and worked as a firefighter and teacher, among other occupations.

Call It Sleep was re-published in the 1960s, and this time was a success; it sold over a million copies and was hailed as a masterpiece. You would think, with that kind of wind at his back, a writer might get in touch with an idle muse and crank out book number two; not Roth. He didn't start writing again until he was 73 - a 45-year layoff! - at which point he wrote a six-novel cycle.

I don't share the critics' enthusiasm for Call It Sleep, but I sympathize with Roth. How would you like to be stuck at your desk for nearly half a century, tearing page after page out of your typewriter, crumpling them up and starting over?

If you don't want to write and you don't write, you don't have writer's block. You go on about your life, drinking beer, watching hockey, etc., without the nagging sense that you should be writing something. You're not a blocked writer - you're a beer-drinking schlub.

But if you want to write and you can't, you have writer's block. For those who write to live - like newspaper reporters and others who tap a keyboard all day for pay - if you have writer's block, you lose your job, and the threat of unemployment usually means you reach deep down within yourself and start writing.

Which brings us to those who live to write. You've got something to say, and you can't find enough time in the day to either write or sit in a place where, if inspiration strikes, you'll be able to get it down on paper. Like Virginia Woolf's "room of her own."

If, despite having a blank computer screen in front of you, you find yourself unable to write, it may be because you're not nacreous enough.

"Nacre" is the substance that forms the inner shell of an oyster. If an oyster gets an irritant - a rock or your brother-in-law Darrell - trapped within it, it secretes nacre around the offending object to make its existence more bearable. This reaction produces a thing of beauty - a pearl. Once enough pearls have been formed in this fashion, a necklace is made that is strung across the bodice of a little black cocktail dress.

One theory of inspiration is that artists create their aesthetic gems as a reaction to the sort of irritation that produces pearls. While this theory isn't true in all cases - I can't write when the two chihuahuas next door are yipping - it has enough basis in reality to be the subject of a highly regarded study by critic Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow.

The central figure of that work is Philoctetes, the Greek warrior whose foot was bitten by a snake. The wound festered, his foot smelled awful and the Greeks abandoned him on an island. They later discovered that in order to win the Trojan War they needed Philoctetes' bow and poisoned arrows. They go back and get him, and Philoctetes hides in the Trojan Horse and kills many Trojans when he gets out.

Wilson concluded that artists were like Philoctetes because their feet stink and people avoid them.

I'm kidding! Wilson drew an analogy between Philoctetes and a number of writers, such as Dickens, who use a psychic wound in their lives as the spur to their art.

So if you have writer's block, it may be because your childhood wasn't unhappy enough, but there's nothing you can do about that now, is there? There are other ways you can "get nacreous," however, and thereby jump start the creative process and become the world-famous writer you're destined to be. Here are a few suggestions from the Famous Pained Writer's School of Writing:

Self-torture. Lying on a bed of nails hurts, but you've got to suffer to sing the blues or write the Great American Novel. Available in twin, Queen, King and Alexander Woolcott sizes.

Artificial stimulants and depressants. Alcohol is a time-tested method of getting your muse to cooperate, up to the point where you get the dry heaves. Experiments during the 1960s with lysergic acid di-whatchamacalit, or "LSD," by contrast, tended to produce works with opening lines such as the following: "It was a dark and stormy night, and as I looked out the - OH MY GOD - THE CARPET IS EATING MY TOENAILS!"

"Slumming It." Many writers - Orwell and Steinbeck come to mind - deliberately expose themselves to substandard living conditions in an effort to experience life in its rawest form, facing hunger, bedbugs and guys named "Mitch" who say it's your turn to buy the next bottle of high-alcohol bum wine.

Not exactly a pleasant existence, but on the other hand, it is irritating.

- Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer whose works include The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, 10 published plays and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn (Joshua Tree Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor.