Does one have to be a writer to have writer’s block?
Sit down. Be quiet. Don’t whine. Open word document. A fresh A4 page. Choose font to suit mood. Drop idea. Stick with Times New Roman. Move cursor to the top of the page. Prepare to write…. Prepare to write…
Stare. Stare. Stare. Let fingers hover over the keyboard. Feel inspired. Feel very, very motivated to write. Mentally take your hand inside your head and rummage through looking for an idea. A figment of an idea perhaps?
Leave it. Get up and go for a long walk. How long can the mind remain blank? There must be some point when it stops being blank and throw over a nugget of idea, a simple thought, a sentence.. a word… an idea of a word?
Things are so topsy turvy, they are turvy-topsy. I feel I have a lot to talk about but I cannot quite form the right words. So instead I am writing about the state of non-writing.
How can it be writer’s block if I am writing? It is like selective amnesia, really. I have selective writer’s block. The mind refuses to produce bouts of ideas for what I want to write about and only words of frustration make sense and tumble out…
Then perhaps stop. Then perhaps sit back and decide not-to-write rather than to-write. Maybe the mind works like Thing 1 and Thing 2 from ‘The cat in the hat’. Order them something and they would guarantee doing the opposite. Maybe the mind is engineered to go as far away from things you are concentrating too much on, maybe it is lazy and exhausts easy.
So here it is. This is me stopping and unwriting. Lets see if it works. And soon.
Related articles
- “Listening to Writer’s Block” by Joshua J. Mark (writersparty.com)
- They make Drano for that, don’t they? (studenteventsblog.wordpress.com)
- Unclogging this writer’s block (myrandomlittleblog.wordpress.com)
