BANG! Just when you thought you’d beaten him, that blank wall blew your mind!
There you were, all nice and cozy in front of your pristine writing surface, all set up and ready to write! And she waited. And she waited. And she waited. Forever, it seemed. NOTHING!
After what seemed like an eternity, you turned off the computer in disgust, replaced your well-crafted writing instrument in its velvet-lined case, and crept back to the land of the living.
Exhausted. Discouraged. Disheveled. Disgusted.
What a waste, I’m not a writer. Hell, writers go through this at a mile an hour. Me? A crooked old 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. Target NO! I knew in my heart that I was a WRITER!!!
Sounds familiar? Some of the details may have been changed, but I bet you’ve had the same type of roadblock a few times before.
And in all cases, you have moved away from trades, feeling lower than the left kneecap of a snail.
Take heart! You’re not alone. Thousands of writers and aspiring writers are pounding in waves against the same wall. Some give in.
“Do you want fries with that?”
Others eventually 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 the main culprit is likely to be: your inner critic and censor, working overtime to prevent you from being “too creative.”
The other is more subtle, but just as real: You may be experiencing “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 frozen on the writing surface is NOT for lack of ideas. It is precisely the opposite.
I bet if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll 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 from all those ideas and themes.
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 dreary darkness. In a corner of this otherwise empty room stands a wrinkled old man in a green sun visor, sleeves rolled up, peering thoughtfully through bottle-bottomed glasses of Coke at a clipboard in his gnarled hands. and arthritic. . The clipboard is adorned with rubber hand stamps of various colors and sizes, and curiously each one has the same words on the front of the stamp: “Rejected. Not Relevant.” This little old man is also wearing a big red button tag that proclaims in bright, contrasting lettering, “Mind Story Idea Selector.” 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 in. Through the open door, you see a sprawling meadow filled with small bright yellow flowers that gently sway in a light breeze. There’s a hint of music in the air from some unseen source. The meadow stretches into the distance and you realize that it borders a forest of brightly colored pine trees. Behind the pines, you see a towering mountain range tinged with blue. A layer of snow covers the very tips of the mountains.
It’s all so serene.
You yell, “Any ideas around here? Any ideas at all?”
The words are barely out of your mouth when out of those luscious flowers leaps a horde of drooling, scaly, furry, slimy, green, brown, toothy ogres of all shapes and sizes from all over that beautiful meadow, and from even as far as the farthest pines. Each of these unholy abominations is wielding some sort of large, heavy, pointed, or rounded tool. Pounding the earth, crushing the flowers into used coffee grounds, they silently run towards you.
You close the door just in time.
You hear the myriad of thumps as the monsters collide with each other. They bang furiously on the door, trying to break through.
Those ideas are ready to make you some serious mayhem!
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 doorway, is a jumble of ideas, their arms interlocked, their legs together, and they’re encased in an almost impenetrable mass, all trying to get through that little door at once.
Your 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 squeezing even more.
Again, your Mind 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 story idea selector exits the room through another door that has magically appeared in an adjoining wall, leaving him now all alone.
And you call it writer’s block!