5 Ways To Defeat The Most Serious Case of Writers Block You’ve Ever Had
(And a Hidden 6th Way If You Can Find It).
“Sit up in your chair and write 1,000 words before breakfast. Feel the pulse of the electricity coursing through your veins. Energize the page with lightning and turn the temperature up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit! Watch the paper burn as your characters run away with zest and gusto! Try to keep up as they are carried away by the truculent forces of love and hate! Love and hate, all good writing is love and hate.”
He heard the words of the Zen master replaying in his head but had neither zest nor gusto, not electricity, nor fire, nor zeal, nor anything. He had just woken up for the last time and hadn’t had his morning coffee and the whirr of the air compressor unit outside his window worked like a mosquito bite on his imagination. Gusto? He just wanted to climb back in bed, but had promised himself 250 words before anything else would happen. Characters? He didn’t even have a character, much less one getting zapped with Jovian thunderbolts. He would need a 12-volt just to get started.
A man with a gun burst in the room… no, that wouldn’t work. There was nobody there but him and his books. The books had monsters in them, characters for sure, men killing dragons, women falling off the cliff and into some knight’s arms, and honey-dipped poems about men and women on horseback galloping through moonlit roads to rendezvous under willow trees.
All that and there didn’t seem to be a story in the world that he could write. All the good stories were written and there were plenty of bad stories available to him, and he was a real hound-dog when it came to sniffing those out. While he wasn’t great at finding good stories, you could bet that if he was going to find a story, it would be half-decomposed by the time he smelled it.
Walking out of his library, he lit his pipe and scratched his jaw. Maybe, he thought, a cup of coffee would do me right. He opened up the cupboard, but there were no filters. He looked at his pile of laundry on the reading chair and the brown t-shirt suggested itself. “Maybe back in my Army days, sure,” he smiled, “but I think I’ll run to the store.”
The engine sputtered and kicked and puffed, it coughed and choked and stammered. But it didn’t start and it didn’t run. “A stoic,” he said as he slapped the fender. Walking to the store he saw his neighbor pulling weeds and interrupted him to talk. They discussed gardens and the writing process and the love of art and beauty. He continued to the café, ordered a latte, sat by the window, and watched the trains crawl along the tracks by the riverbank. A pretty woman walked by the window and her red dress with white polka dots and buttons fluttered in the breeze and her white straw hat with a wide floppy brim and red bow blew off and rolled down the hillside. She watched the hat roll and he watched her watching, but when she looked around for help he looked down at his mug.
He sat there in the chair for an hour and ordered another coffee and struck up a conversation with the baristas about anything that would keep them from doing their job. He walked to the hardware store and bought a spade and carried it around town for a few hours, looking at the trees in the park, and the birds in the fountain and wondering why a story wouldn’t happen to him. He had elements of a story, he knew, but there was no one there, a Caesar, or a Kramer, or a St George to tie it to, no highly conductive elements, no copper wires or grounding rods. There were merely rubber tires and insulated gloves, he believed, and went home, leaving his spade on the park bench.
He sat down in his chair in front of the paper he had stared at for an hour in the morning. He picked up the pen. As the room full of books darkened and he saw the lightning bugs begin to fire outside his window he thought, “1,000 words before breakfast. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen. There’s always tomorrow.” He put the pen down, laid down in bed, and closed his eyes.
As his mind faded into oblivion he saw the lady in the red dress, the hat rolling down the hill, and himself jumping out of his seat to help her. He saw himself from 2,000 feet above the earth struggling through the vines and grass and brush and grabbing the hat and returning the hat to the woman who was so delighted with his act of charity that she left lipstick on his cheek and offered to buy him a coffee. They went into the coffee shop together and sat across from one another and he admired her blue eyes, no they were brown, wait, yes blue, and she said something but he couldn’t make out what it was, just the sound of dew on hemlock and he reached over to touch her hand but it was gossamer. And he went to sleep floating above the ground watching the world turn black and white, never having written anything he was proud of, and seeing the grey earth fade into distance, shrinking into a single red dot.
Did you enjoy reading this? Follow Quill & Trowel for more.
