On writer's block
sksperry has a discussion of writer's block here.
I find writing fiction very difficult. I am in awe of writers who can come up with 1000+ words any day, much less every day. When I'm on, I can do 1000 words in a little over an hour, but...
The hard part is flipping the switch to "ON" at all. I can sit down and start writing, and it is unbelievably difficult to get even a sentence out. I have to keep working through the stubborn refusal of my brain to dish up anything at all.
I sit there and my brain is utterly blank. I realize this seems impossible to people who have witnessed me hold forth for hours in a conversation, but there it is. Nonfiction, opinion, essay...my brain has an open tap most of the time. Fiction...the tap is rusted shut and some bastard has come along and broken off the knob.
I don't know if that qualifies as writer's block. I don't think of it that way because thirty years of writing fiction have revealed to me that this condition is apparently permanent. It has never gotten easier. Even when I am able to force 1000 words out in an evening, I am wrung out and brain-dead at the end. If the writing has gone unexpectedly well I may be jazzed, but I'm still tired and desperately want to stop.
I never have experienced the feeling of "Oh, let me keep writing!" Never. Not once in thirty years. I always want to stop and just be done. Even when I'm jazzed, it's effort to keep myself in the damn seat, to stifle the impulse to say, "Hey, you did a good bunch, you can stop now."
So when I'm not sitting down and at least trying to get words past the sludge in the pipeline, I don't think of that as writer's block. I think of that as declining to suffer the mental pain of forcing myself to produce words. Some days, I just don't have the will.
(One might ask why I write at all then. I ask myself the same thing every time. The answer varies, but ultimately it sums up as, I like having written. I like having words in front of me that wouldn't exist in that order, a story that wouldn't exist in anything like that form, if not for me. I wish I could get these things without the work, but I can't. They can't be purchased. They can't be created in another way. It's sit and write, or do without. So I write.)
P.S. Wrote 700 words today. Will go finish the freelance project, then shower, then maybe go back to write some more. Am less than 10K from my pre-Thanksgiving goal, but since I expect to miss some days, I need to keep pushing.