I suffer from an acute case of writer's block. Ideas float just beneath my conscious mind, bulging against the sides of a thought-tight bag of "have to do," "should do," and "want to do." I can squeeze and stretch the bag, occasionally seeing a glint of phrases that I do not know what to do with. The shadow of a theme plays behind my eyes. A snatch of a sentence whispers through my ears. Attempt to grasp it, and it simply evaporates, or shatters, then reassemble's somewhere else, pulls its drawers' down and moons me out of spite.
I wanted to write a song. It would begin with "The heart hangs from a string," but I have no idea what that means or where it intends to go.
I thought about a satire of some sort, yet suddenly, hyperbole and sarcasm seem utterly incomprehensible.
I had a beautifully strange feeling that I must put down in words before I burst my latex brain, but I know that if the words are not just right, I will rob myself of the mood. I feel like I do when a creature falls asleep in a position too adorable to bear and all I want to do is rush to it, grab it up in my arms and absorb its cuteness, but I know that in doing so, I will wake the poor thing and pop that bubble of cuteness forever.
I even tried to put all these frustration down in a post, but after a few paragraphs, I lost my head of steam and developed writer's block for my writer's block.
I have been told by other writers that one cure to writer's block is to "free write". Could be snippets of stories, could be a grocery list mixed in with the 23rd Psalm, backwards. Could just be random garbage.
ReplyDeleteEasy enough for them to say - they weren't blocked.
Of course, that could mean one of two things:
a) They were never blocked in the first place.
b) The cure works.
(I tend towards answer (a)).