Ugh! It’s happening again. I open Microsoft Word and stare at the new blank page. What should I write about this week?
Well, I am going on tours around the city, I can write about a few experiences. Nah. Wait until August. I can write about Guyana, but that will just get a bit critical given how I am feeling now. And this is something all writers will relate to, to write one must feel, to write would mean to feel!
I have to feel the words from my mind pass through my fingers, onto the keyboard and voila, it is on the page. But I do not feel anything.
I’m just scribbling whatever comes to mind. Whatever I feel, I scribble and I want to write – I do not want to scribble. Why can’t I write? How can I call myself a writer and not be able to write? Ugh! It is as thought there is something blocking my train of thought.
That is it! A block! Writer’s block. Oh the horrid feeling of being inadequate to think and to write when one of your joys is to think and to write.
I turned to Google. What is writer’s block? “The condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.”
Thank God I do not suffer alone. It really is a drag to just sit and not feel.
Even in reports, you can sit and sit and watch, watch while sitting, sitting and watching, staring at a page with all the information in front of you, staring at it, it staring back at you. And you both look emotionless until the frustration sets in. Where to begin? What angle to take and which ideas to present. Why the hell is nothing coming to me?
Imagine you read something and have to read the pages over and over again because you are unable to process the information. The words just stare up at you and make no sense and yet you struggle to make use of them. There is nothing in your head to write, yet you have the urge to write something; but what?
The horrid writer’s block.
For creative writers that is perhaps one of the most terrifying things to experience; feeling as though you have lost that creativity is equal to losing one’s mind, one’s imagination and one’s way of expressing uniqueness through the art of words.
This really is a disease of writers. But how do I overcome it?
Well I asked Google again.
According to Irene Clark, author of Invention. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing, strategies for coping with writer’s block are class and group discussion, journals, free writing and brainstorming, clustering, list making, and engaging with the text.
How does one engage with one’s text? “Hello words, write yourselves.” Ugh! This makes no sense. But she did make an excellent point, engage with words; use words for everything, speak words, write them, play with them, get your ideas and script them, put them in a journal, discuss them! And before you know it ideas rush out, discussions spark more ideas and interests and a journal can be the first draft of that paper you’re staring at.
Well look at that! I just wrote about not being able to write. I read about why I am unable to write, looked to Google to give me an idea and wrote about writing nothing. (Jairo Rodrigues)
