Curing the Common Block

Still wet from my morning shower, I sat paralyzed in my desk chair.  Physically fresh but mentally funky.  Fingers on the keys.  Eyes on the screen.  Mind far, far away.  The cursor blinked hypnotically.  I stared at it, hoping it would move on its own.  I cramped.  No.  Worse.  I hit a block.  Perhaps the blank screen would fill with wit if I just gazed at the blinky cursor long enough.  Three minutes passed.  Seven minutes. Fifteen minutes.  Nothing happened.  Nothing came.  It was official.  I had contracted blogger's block.

Panic.  Sheer terror.  The self-imposed deadline was quickly approaching.  Hours away.  What did I have?  Twelve hours or so?  It wasn't enough.  I desperately needed more time.  The big, sexy hook I'd concocted in the shower and forced into web ether looked terrible in type.  Read aloud it was no better.

Suffering from severe writer's cramp and paralyzed by the blank Blogger canvas, I did what any writer with a deadline would do.  Panic.

That was it.  It was all I could come up with in the 24-hour period spent dwelling on the upcoming post.   It was crap.  Garbage.  Backspaaaaaaaace.  The screen was blank again.  The cursor blinked mockingly.  I knew I was in for a rough day.

Experienced writers will tell you there isn't a cure.  There's no magical remedy to fix your mental freeze.  You're a good writer.  OK.  Maybe just a decent writer.  But in that instance of mental meltdown, no one would know it.  The advice they lend is to write.  Write rubbish.  Even when the content is complete shit.  The physical motion will snap the blocked brain back to intellectual writing form.  Or at least writing form.  Poo humor and four-letter words probably don't qualify for intellectual writing.

Never erase.  Never delete.  Ever.  That's the rule.  Let the fingers do the walking and remove the mind from the process.  The block is a mental trick telling the writer that everything put to paper by their hand is crap.  Even if 99% of what you write is useless (unlikely), that 1% could be very helpful in crafting or refining your piece later.  So avoid the delete key or rubber eraser at all costs.

Deadlines are unfair.  The saying you can't rush art applies just as much to a writer's moleskin as it does to a painter's canvas.  Prose always has room for improvement, so the only benefit to a deadline is to excuse yourself of spending the next eternity on your piece.  Comforting, but not when your in a writer's block.  To overcome the sense of impending doom, push the deadline to the back of your brain.  Put it on the back burner.  Ignore the anxiety of the deadline so you can force yourself to write without extreme influence of short time.

Heeding the advice of the so-called experts is easier said than written.  A blocked writer already feels inadequate from the inability to flow prose into their medium, and the exercise of producing crap with the hopes of it turning to gold is a real test of will power.  Forcing fingers to fly across the keyboard or pens to fill paper only to have the dregs staring back is a true lesson in discipline.

So can you do it?  Can you overcome your paralysis and let the stream of conscious take over?  Can you overcome your pride and allow your fingers to produce pure shit?  Can you overcome the urge to hold down the delete key and refrain from erasing the mucky musings?  Can you overcome the anxiety spurred by closing deadlines?  Can you do it?

Can I do it?

Looks like I just did.  This morning I sat in my bath towel frozen by a blogger's block, and twelve hours later I've returned to the same chair, polished up what began as a morning turd, and find myself preparing to hit the Publish button.

Suck it, blogger's block!

xoxo,
ShavedGolf

Image stolen from Bear-ing It All.