For the last couple days, if you ask any of my friends you will know that I’ve complained about hitting a wall. This has prompted people to ask me questions on why I even write anyway? What’s the point if I don’t really reap any financial rewards or large recognition from it?
The simplest answer to this question is that I enjoy writing, and when I don’t write, I miss it. The more detailed answer lies in the fact that when it comes to a lot of personal things, I’m a highly reserved person. However, I am also someone who enjoys deep conversations and thoughts, yet being reserved it is hard for me to talk about these ideas without talking about my experiences. Through writing, I feel more comfortable talking about myself because I don’t feel like I’m burdening anyone with my problems. It’s an easy outlet for me to vent or dispense my feelings and come as close to being an open person as I can.
If writing is such an easy outlet for me, then why do I have writer’s block? Even the best of writers and the most famous ones face this phenomenon, and it’s a difficult question to answer. For me, it isn’t that I don’t have any ideas to talk about. However, I have no solid interest in writing about any of them. If I did have interest and I started writing, my words would fizzle out very quickly and I’d be staring at a few measly black prints on a mostly-blank page. This process repeats itself consistently, and at some point, each mostly blank pages make you feel like a failure at writing. It’s frustrating to not be able to churn out any pieces of work when you have a topic almost every week for a while.
Sometimes, I am able to finish the writing but the quality of the work is nowhere near what I want to display. I make sure that every article that I submit is something that I extremely proud of and would feel confident in standing behind, but for the past couple days, every completed piece I have feels like something I would have written for a standardized exam in middle school. This adds to my frustration, at which point I quit all the word document tabs open in my browser and distract myself with something that’ll take away the anger at my inability to write.
I am not sure how to resolve the issue of writer’s block, but I felt that maybe I could write about what it’s like to have writer’s block hoping some other fellow writers out there can understand the sentiment I face. It’s a confusing combination of anger, frustration, sadness, and irritation that makes me develop a lack of motivation to pick up the pen and paper (or my laptop, in this case). I hope that at some point this writer’s block lifts so that the jumble of ideas in my head can sort itself out and I can make coherent, strong pieces of writing out of them.
