Writer’s Block

Hello,

People may be wondering why there has been a distinct lack of depressing, self indulgent nonsense on the BHASVIC floating around lately, which is mainly due to me becoming stricken with unshakable writer’s block. At present, my biggest problem isn’t not wanting to write, it’s not knowing *what* to write, or how to express it. I’ve spent the last 45 minutes staring into a blank word document, hoping that just one mediocre sentence would form itself from the caverns of my thought. In typical procrastinotic (is that a word?) fashion, this has led me to start thinking about the nature of writer’s block. Obviously it could most simply and literally be summed up as a lack of creative energy in the mind of a writer, but being stuck up and quasi intellectual, I like to see it as something more.

If you will humour me, consider creative energy as a village water pump in a desolate village. As long as the water is flowing, the writer can be nourished, and can enjoy the wealth of abundance, but as soon as something prevents the flow, everything in the writer’s life can grind to a holt. Perhaps the image of the average casual poet sinking into a downward spiral due to a lack of Myspace blog material is somewhat overdramatic, but I know that many times a lack of inspiration has served as a catalyst to a general bad mood. Now, when the writer searches for their ration of inspiration, they find nothing, not even a single drop of ability. Quickly, confusion turns to full blown bewilderment to complete and utter despair. The problem is, however much you force the pump, you still get nothing. You can punch, kick, prey or scream at the thing for as long as you want, it’ll all become counter productive, the only thing that will get the waters of ability flowing again is chance.

The moment you are able to write again seems like a feeling of rebirth, you can lie awake at night dreaming of the opportunities for expression. You sit and write for hours and hours, sometimes shutting out the typical facets of existance completely and only after you’ve finished creating fountains of thought do you sit back and realise that what you have written is meaningless. The waters you have been given have just drained away into nonsense. You were just so absorbed in being able to bring pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as the case may be) you didn’t realise that what you were putting was, for want of a more subtle term, complete bollocks… Then, where do you stand? You’re stuck right back where you were when you were to begin with, with a lingering thirst for creative contentment that cannot be quenched.

Perhaps it’s only me that works this way, but I think the horrors of writer’s block are something that we all deal with at some stage. I apologize if everything above here made no sense, I guess it could be considered a spewing that I hoped would cure me of my impediment.

A genuinely fluffy person really,

- Tom

Tags: Block, Writer's