Block

I’m really bad at dealing with writer’s block. That’s the primary reason I started this blog, after all, that and dealing with actually ending pieces I start. For the most part, the latter has since not really been an issue for me; I think last year’s Write What You Know is a good example of that, given the goals I had set out for it. But I don’t really feel the same way about that incessant issue that is the former.

Now, to be fair, it’s not like I haven’t tried the various cure-alls that circulate the internet. And a lot of them do work. A particular favorite of mine is the “do nothing but” approach where the author dedicates an amount of time to either writing or “doing nothing.” It’s one of the more extreme methods, I’ve found, and I don’t always have the willpower for it, but when I do manage it, I tend to enjoy the results. Another one is changing scenery, which I like not specifically because of the explicit change, but because of the time it takes to make it, giving me time to think about the approach I want to take on a piece.

Time is a key factor in both of those methods. Maybe that’s the reason that, despite knowing about them, I still feel I’m “really bad” at them. There’s still a part of me that wants some sort of magical solution that fixes my problem, even if the rest of me knows there never will be.

The word “angst” gets a bad rap, I think, though it’s not like it doesn’t deserve at least some of it. Being associated with terms like “dark”, “teenage”, and “brooding”, will do that to a word. But I still think it’s the best way to describe how I feel in this instance. “Writer’s block” might as well be “writer’s angst” for me. That’s why the most popular solution, “Do whatever it takes to get words onto a page” never seemed to work for me. There’s that niggling self-doubt that it’s never going to be good enough. So things get retread on and deleted or left open in a tab that I never seem to get back to no matter how many times I say I’m definitely going to finish that. There’s a whole hierarchy at the top of my browser screen for which projects need finishing first and which are just pieces of wishful thinking.

Am I spreading myself too thin? I never feel that I am, though maybe that’s because I just never go back and look at some of these tabs, so the fear of unfinished-ness never fully develops. I do get posts here finished on a regular basis, not to mention, you know, actual schoolwork. But there’s also the wonder of what happens when those deadlines are stripped away and I’m left with a blank Word doc and not much else.

-F