The writer’s block

Harbingers of the dreaded block. 

Every self-respecting _writer_ goes through the writer’s block. It’s almost like a rite of passage. In a paradoxical sense, your inability to produce words on paper for a few months defines your writing persona.

I have gone through this excruciating rite many times over the last few years. My writing episodes often follow a predictable motif. I write prolifically for a few weeks — fiction, non-fiction, social commentary, satire, puff pieces — the mere instant an invisible 0-watt bulb lights in my chapeau, I put it down on paper. Whether it is readable or not, is an altogether different question. But I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of the written word and my own ability at wielding it. And then, like the proverbial tortoise, I withdraw within my shell.

I stare at my screen, I doodle on the top of my notepad and tap away on my tablet, but the words don’t come out. It is a deeply humiliating and depressing experience. Often, writers don’t have a lot of other things going on, adding to the misery! ☺

Writing is an intensely possessive attribute. When a writer cannot write, or what he writes makes him want to hang himself, that’s his world crashing all over him in invisible words. A funny thing about the writer’s block is that it’s a misnomer. It is not so much a _block_ as it is a winding down. When my writing train is chugging along, I seldom stare at an empty page. The writer’s block does not suddenly spring up and stop my words. Instead, it slowly but decidedly creeps on me. The odd day I went to bed instead of writing into my journal, the Sundays spent binge-watching House of Cards, those ideas I jotted down and gave up before fleshing them out — slowly, the disease ascends my mind until that wretched day I stare endlessly at the empty page. It’s been 6 months since I last strung together more than 200 words in one sitting.

Considering how often I stumble at it, are there any patterns which will help me predict my bouts of writer’s block? Or better, are there any patterns which will help me ward it away forever? I decided to assay all my previous writings and spells of writer’s block. And, to my own surprise, some patterns do reveal themselves. Almost every major writer’s block was preceded and sustained by a few distinctive habits or actions of mine.

Pattern number 1: Stop finishing books

Reading is the life-blood of writing. Everybody knows that. I pride myself on being a voracious reader. The first thing I noticed during my retrospection was that even during my writing droughts, I never stop reading. I buy books and ebooks constantly but funnily, I don’t finish as many books before and during a writing drought! Nobody finishes every book one starts. However, when I start abandoning more books mid-way, my writing suffers.

There are two reasons I can attribute to this.

Firstly, reading a tough or boring book is a Himalayan exercise in patience and discipline. You must fight against a million, more-engaging pastimes to trudge through the slush. That discipline and patience is the foundation of good writing. Writing a few words of meaning is easy, but stringing them into a cohesive story or article is a chore. When I stopped finishing books, my discipline muscle atrophied.

Secondly, books are rarely monologues. The one-dimensional medium actually kicks off a million conversations in your mind. Only when you grapple with the ideas of a book and let them ruminate in your mind for a while, do you truly give it due-diligence. When I stopped finishing books, I left those trains of thought unfinished. It was like leaving a magic act before the Prestige. It will not set your mental juices flowing and ergo, you won’t have anything of value to add to the conversation.

Pattern number 2: Overworking

It’s natural to expect your writing to suffer when you spend 12+ hours in the office. By the time you get home, you rarely have enough mental bandwidth to frame a sentence, let alone hundreds of them. Overworking is sometimes necessary and understandable. However, I overwork when there is no need to. I compensate for unproductive hours during the day by staying back at night. That is laziness masking itself in workaholism. Overworking when I don’t need to, affects my temperament, my circadian rhythm and my writing.

Pattern number 3: Stop reading physical newspapers

In this digital age, we have mostly given up on old-school newspapers. I am no Luddite to criticize that. I read online news everyday, but there is a subtle difference in the way I respond to the same content through the different mediums. When I am reading an editorial on an ePaper, I treat it as a source of information. I consume it, digest it and move on to the next tab. When I am reading the same editorial on a physical paper, I treat it as a source of ideas. I don’t know why. Somehow the warmth of a fresh morning newspaper and its sound, smell and feel stir you to think while you consume the news. There is no music playing on Spotify, there are no notifications on WhatsApp to distract me. When I stop reading physical newspapers, I continue to stay well-informed about everyday affairs, but I stop responding to them through my words.

Pattern number 4: No physical activity

This is more or less related to the 2nd pattern. There is a mysterious connection between the body and the mind. When you play, work-out, do Yoga or quite simply take a walk in the park, your mind rejuvenates with ideas. When you cut off all physical activity, your mind retreats into itself. Looking back at my blog’s archives, I could see that its most prolific period exactly coincided with my 6-month spell at the local gym. When I stopped going to the gym (citing work), my blog posts started drying up.

Pattern number 5: Taking myself too seriously

This was a very bitter pill to swallow. Upon reading through my old blog posts, I noticed that whenever my writings start getting popular among friends or on the net, I slowly stop writing so much. When my writings fly under the radar, I write constantly. I blame my ego for this. Everyone writes, to a certain extent, to be appreciated and recognized. Writing can be a lonely and cold exercise at times and it feels good to bask in the warmth of approbation. But slowly, I start setting too high bars for myself. I would start writing an article and midway into the second paragraph, find it utterly banal compared to _my standards_. Frustrated and dejected, I give up.

I am no Hemingway. It is good to tell myself that a well-received writing of mine is nothing more than a shooting star. The only bar my writing needs to cross is the finishing line.

There you have it. The fruits of a few painful days of retrospection and scanning through hundreds of my old writings. I hope to never fall prey to these patterns again.

Unlike reading, writing is not necessarily to my life, but it surely enriches it and I will hate to miss out on that.