It has been hours, and still, you sit slouched in front of a desk strewn with notebooks, twirling a pen in one hand, plundering your vacancy of a mind for any spark, any idea, however infinitesimal. The paper in front of you is riddled with half-sentences and half-phrases, all crossed out and screaming at you for your failure of language. Your hands are filthy, streaked with black ink or dusted with eraser shavings.
Sound familiar?
Welcome, writer's block. Creativity shuts down. The world runs on a one-mile-per-hour gear. Every word you spit out clangs out of place. The sentences die from the rusty engine.
Little spurts of writer's block are inevitable. They crop up in poems that fall short of perfection, but I actually had had the heart and grit and will to finish them. In them, I seem as though I could be on either extremity of a spectrum, a longtime writer who had been out of practice or an aspiring newbie who is still not comfortable with the pen. The words just do not come naturally. When this happens, I put away the papers and go to bed, hoping for better luck tomorrow.
But twice I have been plagued by the worst--months and months on end of the same torpor, the kind where it is not simply an inadequacy to compose properly, but something greater, much greater, because it is a total lack of motivation and inspiration. It echoes in loud, invisible earthquakes through my entire being. It challenges who I am as a writer, who I know myself to be. Running away from it is impossible; it becomes one with me. And yes, it is the worst, worst, worst.
I was mid-eighth grade the first time it hit me. I had been editing a manuscript for a book for two and a half years at that point, often for eight hours a day, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I started hating the whole dumb thing. My characters were flat. My storyline was unraveling from all its loopholes. My diction was repetitive and childish. Without meaning to, my passion for it peeled away, all at once. I tried to halt its inexorable crashing-down, pulling it up on the computer and inserting a few sentences every now and then, but it was already dead. And in the end, what kept it from being on the shelves was not rejection by an agent or a publisher or the masses. I killed it on my own.
In the beginning of ninth grade, I had transitioned to purely writing lyrics and poetry and in my diary, no more lofty ambitions like future-to-be novels. I had started writing them in seventh grade but reoriented myself to completely focus on them after my first case of extreme writer's block. More than using my imagination for crafting fiction, now I drew inspiration from my own life, the ups and downs and every tint and shade of it. I loved to build up tension and fiddle with word play, to create rhymes and compose rhythms, to translate my hectic adolescent emotions into something tangible. But right then and there, it happened again. The feeling did not come like a sudden car crash this time, more of a slow, agonizing, torturous death. I guess I just got bored with my life, that's all. Nothing was happening anymore. Everyone was the same, and every day was the same, and the person that had been the biggest inspiration to me at the time was no longer in my life. What could I find to write about when I had already written about everything? What could I do to bring myself back to who writers know themselves to be, excitable and teeming with emotion? Instead, the world was disappointing and insipid and all I could do was drag myself through the murk.
How did I recover? Did I just instantly feel better? Did I know it when it happened? Well, no. It happened slowly, without awareness, and even I can't say when it happened or exactly how long it took, but I'm better now.
If you're ever hit by writer's block, the first thing I'll say is to not concentrate on the fact that you have writer's block; the very words "writer's block" sound big and all-consuming and inescapable. Fixate instead on other things . One thing I've found, personally, is that a major reason for my lull was that I was getting sick of the writers and the music and the art that had inspired me. I found new music, read new books, and made a Spotify account. My friend bought me a book with 300 writing prompts that I had never seen before. And it just all broadened my mind and ignited something within me. People do tend to get used to things, and sometimes all they need is a jump-start. Try different mediums of writing; do prose, lyrics, rhyming poetry, free verse poetry, short stories, slam poetry.... Don't just find inspiration; find new inspiration.
Another thing is to think about your thoughts. Seriously. After all, the mind creates writing, and sometimes I find myself thinking in certain metaphors. I say to myself, Hey, that metaphor wasn't that bad. So I make a note of whatever I had caught my mind spewing out, to spew it out again later on paper, and judge if I still like it at that point, or if I had been crazy thinking earlier that it could work. Even if you don't think in metaphors, which is me around 95% of the time, you can weave other phrases or details of your everyday thoughts into your next piece of writing. Those are real, authentic musings, and you most likely will not have to worry about sounding rehearsed or fake. Hey, it may even give an intimate tone to your words.
Most of all, by contemplating your thoughts, you notice patterns about what things and tasks and people you keep coming back to. It is here where you can find so much to write about. Writing about what I care about, what affects me--all these emotions tend to fuel my best works.
Every person's experience with writer's block is as unique as their writing, but writer's block does not have to be set in stone if you don't want it to be. In the end, the best thing that comes from it is that after it's over, I appreciate so, so, so much more the moments I do have inspiration. When I feel I am wired properly and I know the blood flowing in my veins is mine, I can appreciate any half-decent piece of writing I create so much more profoundly. It's an occasion for ice cream when I write something that I feel is good. It's such a splendid achievement, in fact, that I want to frame the moment because I really am never sure whether I will write anything better. But that's what makes writing so exciting.
