Every week starts the same: Monday morning I vow to submit my Odyssey article early so I don’t stress myself out for the coming Sunday, and then Sunday night I sit in front of my computer with my head in my hands as my friends laugh, point and hit me with that good old “I told you so.” They know the cycle just as well as I do. They mistake it for laziness, but anyone who’s ever had to write even a school essay knows the struggle for what it really is:
Writer’s block.
Laying in my bed at 10:30 on a Sunday evening, I can’t help but laugh at the fact that I keep putting myself in this position. Across the room, my roommate and her boyfriend are yelling possible topics at me as I pretend to listen, while I’m really just watching Scream: The TV Series on a small window next to my empty word document. I’ve been thinking all day, but nothing has come. No possible topics, no inspiration. If I didn’t understand the commitment that is writing for The Odyssey Online, I’d just pull my covers up over my head and go to sleep. Tempting, yes, but then what would you all entertain yourselves with Monday morning at the breakfast table?
So how does one combat this? To be honest, you don’t. You sit at your computer for roughly 30 to 45 minutes before finding some other way to distract yourself. Writing is a love-hate relationship, something I know all too well. And some of the best writing I’ve ever done has been when I am under an intense amount of pressure, or running down the clock on a serious deadline. Inspiration doesn’t hit in those moments, desperation does. And desperate times almost always call for desperate measures.
So, in this final act of desperation at the end of a long, long week, I’ve chosen my topic knowing that I am not the only one who struggles with finding something, anything to write about before closing out the weekend. I now sit at about 300 words, while what I usually shoot for in an article is over 500. It’s funny, that I cannot find the words to bust out a topic that you all would find remotely interesting but I can waste 500 of them informing my audience (if I have one?) of my literary shortcomings. But I love nothing more than writing the truth and, if I am being completely honest, this Sunday night madness is and will always be, me.
And it is you too. We’ve all hit that struggle, whether on an essay or a school newspaper article, a blog or a novel in progress. You could be the most open minded and creative person in the room but that doesn’t mean that ideas are always meant to be flowing. Sometimes, it takes a while and, sometimes, it takes even longer than that. Words can come naturally at one moment and then feel so foreign the next. Writer’s block is real and, if you rely on it for a hobby or a job, it can be brutal. But in those final hours, when the hopelessness really starts to kick in, that is when what you really think comes full circle. And what I think right now? I think that I am running out of ways to say that it is ok to not know what to say. One word at a time, you will always find your way.
Keep writing my friends, and I will do the same. One article at a time.
