Blocked
Everybody gets it, even the fourth grader on the night before a book report is due. (Do they still assign book reports in grade school?) For me the symptoms are pretty clear. I sit down at the keyboard and find every thing in the world that wants attention that isn’t the current writing project. I’m working on the follow-up to Regard for the Dead, but I’m not getting much done right now. I mapped out the story. I have all these great ideas. I got off to a strong start before the Holidays, but now the flow isn’t forthcoming.
One of my most successful techniques for overcoming “The Block” is music. Turn on something very familiar, a comfortable genre or artist. It can’t be anything new because that will cause me to stop and listen. Keep the overhead lights off. Silence the ringer on the phone. Then sit down and type. Before long I’m “there,” and several hours pass in a minute.
I was almost “there” the other morning, but then I caught a glimpse of two white tail deer looking in my window. They were close enough to fog the glass. That was the end of that writing session. I grabbed my iphone and snuck over to the window and started snapping photos of the deer. Of course they backed away as soon as I moved. They were like kids looking at an animal at the zoo. They knew there was glass between us, but they still retreated at my approach, giving into the self-preservation instinct to increase distance.
Today was going to be the day. My schedule was clear. The Dog settled down and was snoring at my feet. And then I saw a notification that there was a new email. I looked. Damn it! I knew I should have just let it go until later. But I didn’t. Then there was a notification that OS 12.1 was waiting to be installed. Is Jobs haunting me from the grave? It’ll only take a minute or two, right?
So after all that, here I am, slapping together a brief blog about writer’s block. The pro writers all talk about banging out this many words or putting in a number of hours every day. The “discipline of the art.” Well, I haven’t got it right now, and I can’t seem to clear the decks of all the intruding artifacts of what is happening around me. Okay. Stop wasting time sitting at the keyboard and go do something useful.