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Writer's Block

By Jen Monday, July 21, 2008

Blog

Sitting down to write this morning it happened. My mind went blank. Again. Frustration in its most startling form: the white page.

I have the most striking ideas when I'm asleep, in the shower, in the car or otherwise unable to grab paper and pencil. The words flow like wine...in my head. Then they're gone. The dream writer is as verbose as Melville, as discriminating as Austen, as witty as Shakespeare. But the real writer, in my old t-shirt and comfy gardening shorts, needs to look up simple grammatical rules and can't remember what the point of the paragraph is anyway.

Time to start over.

Of course I am working on deadline, all too aware of the hours tick, tick, ticking by. The doorbell rings, the cell phone buzzes, my sons can't complete a task without my constant supervision and I am all too aware of the unsettling scent of the guinea pig's cage. Then of course I have to get the mail. I am trapped by the trappings of my own life.

Meanwhile-or I should say in between distractions-I'm attempting to find peace with this drab piece of writing for the home & garden section of a local magazine. It's just not happening.

The mood in the entire household is souring due to my bad attitude.

Enter my daughter. She looks at me sheepishly and suggests that perhaps I should go for a walk. Then she grins and I laugh. The night before, the two of us watched a video clip of Garrison Keillor at the University of Dayton's 2008 Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. Warning that writing can become a solitary and obsessive experience (gee, no kidding), Keillor urges writers to join the world, go for a walk when the deadline looms. And so I do.

And then I clean the bathrooms and prepare dinner, mulling over a few ideas, formulating sentences in my mind as the chicken roasts. My husband and I go for another walk before I sit down once again to write.

By the day's end there is something discernible filling the white space. A central idea, the body of the piece, some decent quotations, a clear conclusion. Tomorrow, I'll concentrate on rearranging, rewording, transforming the wispiness into something solid before I hit the "send" button and wait.

But between now and then there is sleep....After that, a walk.