I didn’t want to focus my blog on writing. Not solely. It was meant as a writing exercise, a way for me to return to writing every day. I’ve shown that I can do that. I’m at a point where it seems to be inconceivable not to write every day.
Today I am tired. I had a very short weekend, which mainly consisted of a few hours on Sunday. I don’t feel rested at all and have proven myself brain dead a few times today. But not writing or taking a break is still not an option.
So here I am sitting wondering about writer’s block. I’ve said previously that I don’t think I’ve ever suffered writer’s block. I suffered from procrastination. Making a professional art form of it, but I’m way beyond that now.
You may call this a self-imposed writer’s block, but I suppose most forms of writer’s block are self-imposed. And if I keep saying “writer’s block” I might throw up, because it sounds awfully tedious. I might just suffer it from writing about it.
I am suffering from a mild headache right now and closed my eyes for a moment. There’s a certain danger that I might fall asleep at my desk, but so be it. I’m sure I’ll wake myself up when I collapse onto the keyboard.
Upon closing my eyes I concentrated on the darkness for a moment. There was nothing much to see, but you may have experienced colours and shapes swirling behind your closed eyelids before. If not I may have a problem of a different nature entirely, so please tell me if that sounds unusual to you.
As I said, this time there were no colourful swirls, just darkness, or rather a dark greyness. But I still looked for something and do you want to know what I was looking for? Words.
The brain is a fascinating thing, thought processes, the connections between synapses, the electrical flow, memories, how it processes the sensual input it receives. Maybe I should’ve become a neurobiologist, but I’m not keen on dissecting brains, so maybe not. Psychology is good enough for me when it comes to the theory of it all.
I’m injecting that here, because thinking is generally something that happens very fast, associations made by the brain can happen so quickly that you lose track of how they happened and why your thoughts went off in a certain direction.
Sometimes I try to go back in my mind to figure it out, but I can’t always recreate the connection.
So, as I was sitting there for maybe a minute with my eyes closed looking into the dark greyness, it occurred to me to look for words and if it was possible to find them behind closed eyes. I wondered, what someone suffering from writer’s block does, where they are trying to find the words, because they certainly don’t jump at you from a blank screen or page. A blank screen is rather irritating to the eyes, because it is quite bright, so I avoid looking at it for too long.
This is the very slow retelling of a very fast thinking process. Since I ended up opening my eyes without pursuing my search more in-depth, I decided to turn to the screen instead and put these thoughts on its surface. And no, I’m not literally writing on the screen. I’m writing this in an email to myself so I can just copy and paste it to my blog.
The words are there. If you’re a writer, they’re always there. Behind closed eyes, on empty screens, in empty notebooks, in dreams or in the sky. The struggle is to put them where they belong.
If you don’t think you can do it, maybe you shouldn’t. But if it is the only thing you want to do and be good at and the only thing you keep thinking of all day, then maybe you shouldn’t give up so easily.
There are days when I think that I may never publish a book after all, but then I still go back to my desk and write more. And me maybe I won’t publish a book, I don’t know that I will. But I want to and that is what keeps me going, not the other thought. Worry, fear or sorrow can’t stop me.
I won’t know unless I try, right?
2clouds 