BLOW! Just when you thought you had it beat, that blank wall blew your mind!
There you were, all nice and cozy in front of your pristine writing surface, all primed and ready to write! And she waited. And she waited. And she waited. Forever, it seemed. ANY!
After what seemed like an eternity, you shut down your computer in disgust, returned your well-crafted writing utensil to its velvet-lined case, and crept back to the land of the living.
Sold out. Discouraged. Disheveled. Disgusted.
What a waste, I’m not a writer. Hell, writers go through this at a mile an hour. Me? An old crooked mule could beat me on days like today.
And there have been too many days like this for my liking. Maybe I’m not cut out for this kind of work. Maybe Mom was right: “Be an orthodontist,” she had said. Objective NOT! I knew in my heart that I was a WRITER!!!
Sounds familiar? Some of the details may have been changed, but I’ll bet you’ve had the same kind of roadblock several times before.
And in every case, you’ve walked away from the trades, feeling lower than a snail’s left kneecap.
Take heart! You’re not alone. Thousands of writers and aspiring writers hit the same wall in waves. Some give in.
“Do you want fries with that?”
Others finally discover the key. But they don’t share.
Let’s look at what you call your “Writer’s Block”.
There are two aspects.
First, we’ve decided who’s probably the biggest culprit: your inner critic and censor, who works overtime to keep you from being “too creative.”
The other is more subtle, but just as real: you may be suffering from “information overload.”
Let me explain.
If you look closely at what you’ve been experiencing, you’ll probably find that one of the reasons you’ve been frozen on the writing surface is NOT a lack of ideas. It is precisely the opposite.
I bet if you are honest with yourself, you will find that the ideas come to you all mixed up and in great profusion. Your challenge, and why you freeze, is because you have a hard time selecting among all those ideas and topics.
At the risk of boring you, let me tell you a little story to illustrate my premise.
Imagine that you are in an empty room with no windows. In front of you is a blank wall with a door sporting an ornate handle. As you look around the room, you notice that all the walls are blank, smooth, shapeless, faceless. A soft glow permeates the room, barely dispelling the gloomy darkness. In one corner of this otherwise empty room stands a wizened old man in a green visor, sleeves rolled up, peering thoughtfully through Coke bottle-bottomed glasses at a clipboard held in his gnarled hands. and arthritic. . The clipboard is adorned with rubber hand stamps of various colors and sizes, and interestingly, each of them has the same words on the front of the stamp: “Rejected. Not relevant.” This little old man also wears a big red button tag that proclaims in bright, contrasting letters, “Mental Story Idea Picker.” Your roommate ignores you, but you realize with a flash of recognition that this decrepit old man is your own personal history filter.
You take a step forward, reach out, turn the door handle, and the door swings inward. Through the open door, you see a vast meadow filled with small, bright yellow flowers that sway gently in a light breeze. There is a hint of music in the air from some unseen source. The meadow stretches out into the distance, and you realize that it borders a forest of brightly colored pine trees. Behind the pines, you see an imposing mountain range tinted blue. A layer of snow covers the very tips of the mountains.
It’s all so serene.
You yell, “Any ideas around here? Any at all?”
The words barely come out of your mouth when out of those luscious flowers leaps a horde of drooling, scaly, hairy, slimy, green, brown, toothy ogres of all sorts of shapes and sizes from all over that beautiful meadow, and even as far away as the farthest pines. Each of these unholy abominations is wielding some kind of large, heavy, pointed, or rounded tool. Hitting the ground, grinding the flowers into used coffee grounds, they run silently towards you.
You close the door just in time.
You hear the myriad thuds as monsters collide with each other. They bang furiously on the door, trying to break through.
Those ideas are ready to make some serious chaos out of you!
The door grows from the tension of those ideas. As she watches in rapt amazement, the door swings open under the furious attack. You are horrified. There, trapped in the door, is a jumble of ideas, their arms entwined, their legs intertwined, and they’re wedged into an almost impenetrable mass, all trying to get through that little door at once.
His mind story idea selector, ignoring the open door, looks around the empty room and declares, “No ideas lead here!!”
You look helplessly at the door and, to your horror, notice that the door frame has begun to shrink. Ideas are being squeezed even more.
Again, his Mental Story Idea Selector looks around and loudly declares, “No, no ideas!” Then his Mind Story Idea Selector reaches out for him and, without looking, slams the door shut.
“Well, I guess we’ll call it a day. Nothing here. No ideas. Nothing at all! Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow.”
He watches helplessly as his forgotten mind-history brainstormer exits the room through another door that has magically appeared in an adjoining wall, now leaving him all alone.
And you call it writer’s block!
