Allow me to set the scene. You’ve pulled the whole “take-the-day-to-think” approach to starting that essay, script, story, etc. that you’ve been meaning to put a substantial dent in. The due date is approaching and you have a least a few hollow ideas floating around in your head.
You say goodbye to your friends, retreat to the glow of your laptop, switch your cell phone to “Do Not Disturb,” then fire up your Word processor with all the confidence that you will get some work done. However, there is just one small issue: actually starting.
“So, what do I write about?”
I started calling myself a writer during my junior year of high school. It simply felt right. Fiction and poetry came easily to me, my teachers praised my work, and work that I managed to share with friends was usually met with excitement and adoration.
Writing was and still is a passion of mine. But with any great passion there comes confusion, irregularity, and sometimes utter chaos. We get these huge, monumental, best-seller worthy ideas at the most random times, but, as the universe would have it, nothing is ever quite that easy.
You don’t have to be a wordsmith to know the mocking of a blinking cursor, the openness of a blank document, or the pressure to fill up a currently unmarked page. You don't have to have best-seller aspirations or Times worthy diction to know this feeling.
“The Block” comes to anyone with a desire to put words to a page and make meaning of them. It cares little about your deadline or your subject matter. It knows that that opening line is superb, that transition sentence is great, and that story idea will go far, but the entire game changes once you sit down and try to pound out that first word.
Can this plague be remedied? I believe so.
There is no secret way to write. To date, there is no technology, app, or service targeted toward thwarting writer's block.
We have deadlines to meet, professors who require work, self-assigned goals to reach, and a running clock that's always working against us. So, what is a writer to do when the cursor is blinking, the hours are flashing by, the coffee pot is empty, and the word count is still low? It's simple: you write.
About anything
About nothing
About everything
About your fears
About your insecurities
About your dreams
About your passions
Anything.
It’s amazing how the mind works, really. I don’t recommend the popular opinion of busying yourself with something else simply because I feel it opens the door for mass amounts of procrastination, which would have an opposite effect for the situation at hand. As unrelated, as off the wall, or as unassociated with the task at hand, get those words down.
Even if you spend twenty minutes just writing about what you’re afraid of and delete it all in the end, your words are still flowing and your mind is engaged. Set a time to come back to the primary project and see how much easier the words come to you.
Feeling like those words will never come to you and having to see the empty page only get emptier is never a good feeling. Knowing that you have great ideas to fill that page up but just aren’t sure where to start might make matters worse. However, writing is continuous and trailing off has a way of bringing you back to where you were supposed to be. So, give it a try.
Heed my advice and, just for the hell of it, write.
