For me, there is the Muse and, then, there is the Rich Little Muse. The Rich Little Muse does a hilarious impersonation of the real Muse. My weakness as a writer is in my inability to distinguish between the impersonator and the real thing.
The Rich Little Muse inspires me to sit down and begin work on a simple idea. Four hours later, I find I have started a novel or a poem or a screenplay and I have none of those skills. Or worse, I discover I’ve spent four hours of my life that I’ll never get back, delving deep into my creative side and only brought forth sentimentality or pretentious pedantry.
At my best, I write stories. On a good day, I can string together a few good stories into a semi-coherent point.
Lately, I can’t finish a thing. There is a blog piece about road trips that I just can’t seem to end. There is a short story about, well, I guess it is about a young man who has moved far beyond his West Texas roots, yet, he only need step off a plane, and in to his father’s dually, to be engulfed by the part of himself that he barely remembers.
All writers get stuck from time to time and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Getting stuck is different from writer’s block. Getting stuck usually happens when the writer is growing and the shift is a challenge.
A stuck writer can still see the wall of rock, the next hand and foothold. Writing is like rock climbing. It requires stretching, fear, balance and discomfort. Stretching creativity requires daring and perseverance.
For stuck writers, irony and metaphors lurk everywhere, like similes about the stars in the sky. But, to no end. Writer’s note: When you are stuck you are allowed to start sentences with, “But”.
In a stuck phase, ideas collect into something resembling “Bartlett’s Quotations”. Reassuring in their availability, but lacking a context, they ring hollow and less profound. Clever song titles without words or score.
Still, if you are stuck, you are not afraid to write for the sake of improving your craft with no notion that someone must read it to make it useful. Being stuck is a way of taking inventory of everything that goes into the creative process and is why writing does not pay by the hour.
Writer’s block on the other hand is like a dead end cave you are sure holds treasure. You crawl deeper into the narrowing crevice of promise, so deep your shoulders become wedged. In a while you start to hear the echoes of clown laughter from a nightmare, drawing closer to check their traps. Writer’s block is the place where self-doubt feeds on the soul. This is the place where some of our greatest writers, and many who could have been, disappear into the abyss.
I think I am either lowering my standards or getting better at this writing thing. I may get stuck now and then, but I rarely go in caves, literal or literary.
In the work in progress on road trips, I write about temporarily overcoming my claustrophobia and visiting Carlsbad Caverns. I had baby Jonas on my back and he suddenly took ill, deep in the cave. He began projectile vomiting in all directions, especially at the back of my head and down the neck of my shirt. It took a while to get out of the Caverns but then there you were in the high desert of New Mexico covered in vomit.
That’s really nothing compared to writer’s block. I may have had it when I was young, or was that just arrogance and a lack of discipline? The fear of being told or admitting to yourself, “You’re just not very good”, is probably at the root of writer’s block.
At some point a writer becomes mature enough and lost enough in the process of developing the craft of good writing that it doesn’t matter what anyone says or thinks.
The last little bird flaps his wings and takes a few short circles around the nest, growing stronger, preparing to launch in a year. I imagine a time when my schedule will be such that I wake, make coffee, take a walk, then a seat, and write for a few hours every morning.
For now the process is a little more lurching and halting, like my 1966 Mercury Montclair in the final days of its life in 1973. I should write a blog post about that.
azenyardhen 