The other day I spent a good half hour waiting in line to get on the freeway. I'm kind of used to it--I'm beginning to think that I should start decorating my house in orange barrels, it would feel more like home--but I couldn't help feeling a little irritated. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, reapplied my lipgloss (a couple of times, I think), and peered into the windows of my fellow traffic-mates and tried to imagine what kind of people they were. (Most likely they were all the kind of people who get creeped out when the girl in the car next to them stares for twenty minutes.) After our tax dollars finished whatever it was they were hard at work doing, we began to collectively creep forward and move back into the normal manic rhythm of mid-day commute. But even after I was back up to full-speed, I realized that this standstill sort of feeling had been plaguing me for a good long while, only it wasn't a road block. It was the dreaded writer's block.
See, I have much the same problem with writer's block as I do with a traffic jam. Rather than find a solution to the problem (heaven forbid) I distract myself with all kinds of things, trusting that eventually the orange barrels will disappear and I'll be travelling full-speed with the best of them again. It's terrible. Starting up the computer only to stare at a blank page for five minutes and then spend thirty minutes watching more stupid youtube videos (see previous post) is as pointless as getting into the car, buckling the seatbelt, turning on the ignition, and then spending the next half hour wishing the dang thing would somehow move.
I've even started blogging to get away from it!
Oh, well. My blank screen awaits.
(Anyone who has a cure for writer's block, please see me after class.)
I love the analogy. Last year I was stuck on I-15 in Layton for an hour (in the Suzuki no less). I was so irritated and upset that my evening had to be ruined by hot asphalt and the person next to me smoking, that I felt a little guilty when the line finally creeped by the cause of our wait. A car had flipped, landed upside down and then skidded across three lanes. There was glass everywhere, and I'm pretty sure the driver died. My delay was nothing in comparision to what that driver endured.
ReplyDeleteAs for the writers block, I have a perpetual case, so bad that I haven't ever started writing anything if it wasn't for a class:) That being said, my advice is conjecture only and slightly morbid, but I would go to the obituaries, make up stories about the people there and try to make their seperate stings tie together somehow. If you actually try this, I want to hear what you come up with.
I am a firm believer in TELLING a story when you feel like you are at the end of the river. It's not until you allow it to escape the convolutions of your own brain that it becomes something real. And if you've fallen out of love with an idea? Why, that's when telling them really counts. Because it brings back all the reasons you loved it in the first place. Just because a log isn't burning doesn't mean that it has no fire left to give. You just have to stoke it.
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