Death to Creativity: Writer’s Block
October 11, 2004Everyone has faced it. You sit in front of the computer screen, a beautiful white expanse of potential staring back at you. You stare into the blankness waiting for the ideas to come. Ten minutes, 50 minutes, 2 hours later you are still sitting there. The screen is still blank. Your mind is still empty. If you weren’t so incredibly frustrated the situation would actually be a little zen-like in nature. Ah, the empty white screen, yes, my child.
But no. Now you are getting mad. You will write something in that space if it kills you. You write a sentence. It is the biggest bunch of garbage that has ever come out of your head. You delete it. You start again. This one is worse. Click Click Click of the backspace key. Oh shit, you realize, you have a problem. You have the dreaded Writer’s Block.
You start to panic, your imagined life as a successful writer swirling away into you, twenty-five years old enrolled in (gag) nursing school. You, thirty years old, still unable to hold down a steady job. You, one hundred and seven years old, still single, cranky, and worst of all, blocked. It’s the end of the line, isn’t it? Finally, you’ve realized that you just don’t have what it takes to be a writer. You are just going to have to quit now, aren’t you?
Absolutely not. You have reached the first of many stumbling blocks as a writer. If you truly want to be a writer, you will overcome this obstacle in your path, just as you will overcome many other obstacles further in your career. For now, you are going to complete a simple activity:
Stand up.
Yes, really. Just stand up. Stand up and walk away from the monitor. Put on your shoes, leave your room, and take a fifteen minutes walk around the neighborhood. Stop whining about it, it’s not going to kill you. Just do it. And while you do it, notice the world around you. Feel the cool autumn breeze biting into your cheeks. Smell the crisp scent of fallen leaves. Taste a crunchy sweet apple in between your teeth and your tongue. Run your hand along the wizened bark of the neighborhood’s oldest tree. How long has this tree been here? What mysteries has this tree witnessed?
Walk, walk, walk my friend and fifteen minutes later, come back and sit in front of the computer screen and tell about your walk. Don’t worry if it seems bland and uninteresting. Don’t panic if it isn’t the best prose ever written. Just get the story out there. You may be surprised to see where it leads.
