No no don’t worry. I’m not talking about blocking users here (least of all you; you’re my favorite). No, I’m using the word in a much older context, referring to a dread phenomenon bitched about by some writers, and existentially denied by others. Those others, a convincing lot, will tell you that a writer doesn’t get blocked, a writer gets lazy.
Perhaps. And perhaps laziness metastasizes into paralysis. Seems like the result is the same.
No matter—no definitive diagnosis is needed. And I didn’t come here to bitch about it, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. I’m telling myself that I’m merely reporting on events.
And they’ve been…uneventful, as far as writing goes, for me. Words in written form seem to be in short supply. Not much blogging, not much freelancing, not much work done either on those prose-and-poetry projects that I keep in long-lived and little pecked-at files, that are as full as guilt as they are words as long as I’m not pecking at them.
But what the hell. Blocks and laziness need not be forever. Already I’m at word 183 of this little blog post. That’s not nothing. And last night in the wee hours (because on the weekend, wee are the hours I keep), I wrote a little bit in my guiltiest file, the novel I want to finish the most, the story I’m most enjoying unraveling. I didn’t write much: two paragraphs. That’s nothing, practically, in the context of a novel. That’s a ten or twenty year novel rate, that is.
But here’s the thing: I like those two paragraphs. I’m well pleased with them. That is something, something fine.
And that’s the way, I think—along with a few words spilled in posts like these (closing in on 300 words now)—to break out of that rut, and to chip away at the block or the laziness, or whatever it is, or whatever it isn’t.
Dial it in and don’t overthink it. There are two states of being: writing and not-writing. I can’t write all the time. I can however not-write all the time, if I chose or if I allowed. I do not.
