Some may have noticed that in a previous post I mentioned having writer’s block for two years. It’s true.
It was awful.
I tend to get depressed and feel worthless when I’m not writing. It’s not that writing is a distraction so much as it is a fulfillment. When I’m writing, I wake up in the morning smiling and feeling good about the day to come. When I’m not writing, I wake up feeling anxious, wondering why I’m on this earth, if I’m wasting my life. Try that on for two years once.
I’m not sure what happened. I wish I could say. I had two books under my belt, the start of a third one and an excellent idea for a fourth. And suddenly, my words just dried up.
I tried to write. I sat down. Poked at my synopsis. Tried to write up brief scenes that I thought I liked. Nothing came. I would sit, stare at a blank page, freak out after an hour and give up. I found a book at a garage sale about recovering the wounded artist within. The instructions involved journaling and artist care exercises that I tried to keep up with pretty faithfully. Nothing happened. I did the exercises. I journaled. I hated it. I did it anyway. I did not write.
A friend of mine who is into the Hindu faith has a guru. After this non-writing stuff had gone on for almost two years, I stopped treating it like something that would pass and started whining to anyone who would listen about how bad it sucked. My Hindu-interested friend told me he would ask his guru to say a prayer for me.
The guru sent back instructions once he had prayed for me. It seemed I had a dark force feeding on my creative energy, and I needed to use my creative energy before this dark force could eat it, thus starving said force and regaining my writing. The cure involved sitting down for a few minutes every day and devoting my efforts to the patron god of my choice. (Thoth, the Ancient Egyptian god of Language and Wisdom, BTW. He is depicted writing. That’s MY god!)
What were my few minutes of effort to consist of? Drum roll, please: fucking writing.
I think my friend’s guru is wise beyond prayers and malas. His advice was twofold: sit down and write; only make myself do this for a few minutes a day. He just couched it in more metaphysical terms, probably to make me feel better about the advice. (Assuming I was looking for a spiritual reason my words had dried up.) I had tried to make myself write before, but usually for an hour or more, or until a certain page or word count had been reached.
I had been intimidating myself.
So began the slow process. I wrote for two minutes. Then five. Then ten. Two weeks later, I thought to myself how nice it would be when the writer’s block finally broke and I could get some real work on my book done. And it suddenly occurred to me that I had almost ten pages of completely new material on my new book. That wasn’t the work of someone with writer’s block. That was someone writing.
I walked around grinning the rest of the day, and worked for almost an hour on my book that night.
So, writer’s block: my advice? Be nice to yourself. Don’t push it. Set small goals, and jump up and down when you meet them. But for crying out loud, sit down and fucking WRITE.
