Okay, I’ll have to admit it. There have been plenty of essays written on writer’s block. What it is, how we fight it, a number of subjects to write on and suddenly break the silence, et cetra. What I’ll basically do in this little series of mine is merge all the known topics together, add some definitions and also some stories from personal experiences. Because I have to face it, thinking up a topic for YWS was killing me. Actually writer’s block (WB) was. So I decided to fight fire with fire.
You may think you know lot about it already, but once you’ve read this, you can think again. Because incidences like I’ve faced are pretty much one on one battles with WB. And that has helped me become quite the expert, and somewhat of a WB Psychologist. I help the people in need. Let me flow through all I know and share my knowledge.
So this might just be what you are looking for!
I’ll start with the basic. What is Writers Block?
Before coming home and sitting to writing down this piece, I asked my friend (who, by the way, has absolutely no interest in the matter) what she knew about WB and she answered “Some sort of writer disease?” in a confused way. Clearly it was a guess. When I gave her a brief explanation she said, “I think we all had that.” And yes, she’s right.
I looked up the two words on American Heritage Dictionary.
“writ•er's block (rº“t…rz) n. A usually temporary psychological inability to begin or continue work on a piece of writing.’
So now, maybe you’ll have some idea from the definition. Allow me to elaborate. YWS is all writers. It’s our own little Greenwich village. And since we connect to each other that way, I want to bring back a memory for you. Remember when you sat with your pencil and scribbled wild and weird things? You wrote a sentence or two, but it never seemed right? You cut it off didn’t you? And maybe like I do these days, you continuously typed away something, and when you took a good look at it, you didn’t like it. Then you constantly hit the backspace button so much that dad had to drive you to the store and cash in on a new keyboard?
Somehow, someway, so many writers in the world suddenly just end up at the same situation. Biting pencils and shooting baskets with the paper they just scribbled on.
That, according to me, is writer’s block. When all hope is lost, and you’re just sitting there in despair, wanting to murder somebody or howl at the neighbour.
A guy in my class once had such a bad, BAD case of WB that he actually submitted his finals essay with one sentence (when the word limit was 500). You want to know what that sentence was?
“Sorry teach, my mind is blank.”
Yes, it’s true. That essay carried more than half the marks of the paper and failing English got him repeating sixth grade. Poor fellow.
See the deep trouble Mr/Ms/The WB can get us into? Personally when he/she/it comes to haunt me in class I write random things and somehow scrape a B. It’s mostly the hunger for marks that make me fight.
But what about at home? What if you are actually dead bored and dead line awaits? What if you must, must write?
But I’m just going to stop for now at that hint of mystery (like some kind of crime series episode). To find out how to bring on the army and fight WB, just make sure you catch the second part of The Writer’s Block Chronicles! See you then…(Virtually, anyway…)
<- your present 
