Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist

Speaking of writer’s block, it doesn’t exist! I read Sarah Rhul’s essay “Writer’s Block” and apparently it’s not real. As she said, it’s more like “the studious avoidance of writing.” She compares it to “exercise block,” which I have also developed. She gives a number of reasons for avoidance, all of which gave me pause. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’ve not been blocked. I’ve been writing.

Writing is a process. Pen or pencil to paper, maybe a manual typewriter or a computer. Scribbling, deleting, revisioning, and re-visioning. Again and again, another beginning. It can be deeply frustrating. And may I note here that one of the greatest gifts in my life is that I get to get deeply frustrated pretty much every day because I am in my office pretty much every day. How decadent is that!? 

Actually. 

Every day, I write. I stare out the window. I meditate. I might go so far as to stretch my neck and shoulder muscles. Definitely, I check in with my datebook in order to be sure that life is all perfectly organized and laid out. Some days, I’ll move around the furniture. So I’m not writing the whole time.

And yet I am. I must be because there are thousands of words on hundreds of pieces of paper that have zinged about and floated through and lain dormant in this space. As I look back over the past months and years, I do not see anything resembling writer’s block. I do, however, feel a shift within me, a change of perspective. And I hold a small, precious thing that might someday be called a true story. 

Yes! All those attempts at scenes and dialogue and plot and blah, blah, blah are coming together. Years have gone by and I have carried these characters in me, getting to know them, occasionally having conversations with them, more often listening in on their conversations with each other, their pouts and very, very long silences. And, as a result, I have learned what I sort of knew, but now I know a little better: that I am writing about grief and loss and heartbreak because I am writing about humanity’s domination of nature and nature’s comeback, all in the context of four intersecting love stories. And now I have a play in my heart. 

It begins to seep out. That sh*tty first draft that I “finished” back in November is ready to be fed and developed. Hour by day, illegible paragraph by typewritten page. The world seems likely to end before I finish it, but that’s okay. Because I write in order to think: to think about this world in all its complexity and diversity. To imagine what I want the world to be. What I wish might come to pass. Did you know that I have been known to say I want to save the world? Silly me! That’s not possible. 

Silly you! Because in my office, I am in charge. And every day, here, I take one more step towards saving the world, even if that world is as real as the Velveteen rabbit.