Writer's Block

A short contemplative piece on frustrated writers and the origin of writers block

Lydia yanked open the fridge door. The jars on the side rack wobbled and clanked together as she ripped the final beer from the cardboard six pack and slammed the door shut again. Stalking across the tiny kitchenette to the table covered in notebooks, loose sheets of scribbled on paper, and a laptop, she plopped down on a chair and popped the lid of the beverage.

            “You’re supposed to have words on you, damn it,” she muttered at the blank Word document that stared belligerently in her face. “What’s the matter, you shy?”

            It was always like this these days. She had so much to say " it was literally threatening to burst her open if she did not put it down on paper in one way or another. Journal entries would not do. The creative juices had been stewing something magnificent in the back of her brain, something that would take the literary world by storm with its vibrancy and deeper meanings, and frigging journal entries wouldn’t cut it. But she couldn’t get it out the way she wanted to.

            “S**t.”

            It was one thirty AM, and she told herself that she wasn’t going to get anything done tonight. She had been working steadily since ten, and she kept coming up dry. Figuratively speaking. She was anything but dry with five empty beer bottles lined militantly along the edge of the counter. “What are you looking at?” she demanded of them.

            She just wasn’t good enough. That was the problem. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t put her thoughts in order. She sensed they were there " the plots, the characters, the settings, everything. She could feel them swimming around at the base of her cranium just as certainly as a swimmer would sense sharks in the water around her. But unlike a swimmer, Lydia was begging these sharks to bite, to fasten themselves onto her, to make themselves known. And unlike any kind of decent half-witted shark, they refused to do as she asked.

            “It’s because I’m living it,” she whispered into the mouth of the bottle, hearing her breath funnel with a whistle down the neck. She had taken up writing as a hobby when her life had seemed pointless and miserably boring. That was during her injury, when she couldn’t leave the house and had lost contact with everyone she knew. No friends, no adventures, no life. So she created one on paper, and it worked.

            But now she was healed, she was doing things again, having adventures and living life to the fullest. And her writing was suffering. It was as if, sensing it was no longer needed in order for Lydia to survive, the talent " or the motivation " had simply left her without notification.

            Was it even possible to do both, she wondered. Have a full life and write good fiction? Wasn’t fiction an escape from real life? Wasn’t it a slap in the face of reality? But if you loved reality, had a life you did not necessarily want to escape from, wasn’t your writing bound to be lackluster? Instead of breaking down the door locking you in this world, you jiggled the handle feebly and mewled “Let me out”, but didn’t exert yourself. Maybe in order to write well, you had to separate yourself from life. From Dickenson to Seuss, that seemed to be the preferred method " locking yourself up in a room and just writing your life away. Was it worth it? Was being remembered long after death in the form of your writing worth not having a life to begin with?

            “It isn’t,” Lydia decided, her fingers hovering over the lid of her laptop, ready to slam it closed and declare herself liberated from writing.

            But oh, the keys were crying out to her. The blank page was literally tearing a hole in her heart. Every fiber of her being cried out for her to continue. The deep longing to create something worthwhile, something amazing, something complete and beautiful was so strong it was almost a physical force, a curling roiling boil in her stomach that would not allow her to make that final decisive act. She was programmed this way " it was an addiction. She was addicted to it, she couldn’t fight it. It would drive her insane eventually, perhaps it already was, but she couldn’t stop. She would never stop trying.

            Torturously slowly, then, she set aside the bottle and placed her fingers on the keyboard, and preceded to type those two words that were at once full of hope and promise and laden with the dread of a duty that she was not certain she could perform: “Chapter One”.

           

Author's Note

My thoughts on writing and why I might be suffering from writers block

Reviews

[Paul McCall]

Have you ever been in a conversation and you were talking about a book or a movie with a friend and some one said, “what’s the name of that actor that was in such and such a movie?” and you jump up because you know you know the actor but their name just won’t come to you? That is the same thing as writers block and sooner or later the name pops into your head. So will your story! I often take a yellow legal pad and just start writing in longhand (NO key boards) for five minutes, what ever comes into my head. I know, sound dumb, but it works for me. By the way nice piece.