Stuff That I Have Noticed #58 – Writer’s Block
- Posted on 4th September 2022
- in entertainment books
- by Ben
Back before iMacs were around, when I opened a new file in my trusty old Panasonic W1510 word processor, in the upper left corner of the screen it would say “Create”. That’s good advice but it’s not always easy to follow.
Like today, for instance. (I know that’s not a sentence but this isn’t a grammar piece.)
When I’m driving our car with my wife at my side I often point out things I notice which strike me as absurd or just plain stupid. I had a good one on a trip recently and Elizabeth said I ought to write about it and I agreed. It really was a good one. Unfortunately that was Saturday and I had both hands on the steering wheel. This is Sunday and I have both hands on the keyboard but for the life of me I can’t remember that particular pebble in my psychic penny-loafer that prodded my pique.
This brings me back to that aforementioned automatic advice. “Create.”
If I’m a writer (I am.) and I’ve agreed with myself to write at least one piece each week (I have.) then I’m going to do that. I followed that discipline rigorously for a year or so then dropped it. I’ve recently picked it up again and I’m determined to stick to it. So if I can’t remember what I was going to write about I’ll just write about not remembering what I was going to write about.
I’m no psychologist so what I’m about to say is not “learn-ed” or the result of scholarship, it’s experiential.
“Writer’s Block” is an expression with which we’re all familiar. I think it’s a myth. I’m not saying that writers never feel blocked or stuck or dry or just plain uninspired. I am saying that it’s a mistake to give this temporary disability a formal moniker. When you name something you give it weight, importance, reality. An appellation like “Writer’s Block” makes a condition official, carves it in stone so that it becomes like a disease or a “condition” which can be translated as an excuse for not doing what you agreed to do.
“How can you expect me to write? I’m suffering from writers block!”
Psychologists say that we never forget anything. Well, I guess it all depends on how you define forget. I always thought it was the antonym of remember which means “to bring to mind or consciousness, to recall”. But this isn’t a piece about etymology, it’s about ideas and where they go when they’re not there anymore. You know what I mean.
This all started this morning as I woke up. I remembered (brought to mind, recalled) that I had a great idea to write about yesterday as I was coming up to my apartment in the elevator. It was one of these “thought bubbles”, you know, a complete, well formed idea. It had a point to it and it was funny; all the required ingredients for a little essay, just the sort of thing a writer is always looking for.
And now I can’t find it. Where did it go?
Is it lodged in some mental ox-bow miles down the river of my consciousness? Is it floating around on the winds in the universal mind? Is it stored on some obscure hard drive of my bio-computer? Where the hell is it?
When you lose your keys or your glasses you know that they “are˚ somewhere; either in your pockets or your house and eventually they’ll turn up or you’ve lost them and will have to get a replacement. Time will tell and, sooner or later, the issue will be resolved. Even if you do replace whatever’s been lost and then locate the original there’s no harm done; now you have an extra.
But how do you replace an idea? Do you say to your wife, “Well, dear, I seem to have lost that idea I had yesterday. I think I’ll go down to the Genius Bar and get a new one. You need anything from Apple?”
It’s worth a try. Nothing else seems to work.
I don’t know if the foregoing series of words and sentences is worth the time it took to string them together or not but I did string hem together. I promised myself I’d write every day. I did not promise myself that everything I wrote would be brilliant, just that it would be the best I could do on that particular day. I’ll be back tomorrow! (Or in this case, next month.)
Originally written: 9 May 1994 Revised: 4 Sept 2022
Recent Comments