Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's an update!
Writer’s block is a bitch. Especially if you are as passionate about writing as I am. When you intend to pursue a career like journalism as I do, the prospect of a simple creative block can easily make your worst nightmares come true.
See this: you’re given a very important task, which constitutes in writing a detailed article about...let’s say, politics. No, not politics, anyone these days thinks they can talk about that. Well, let’s establish the article is about any important subject.
Your boss will definitely give you thumbs up if the article turns out good. So, you sit on your work desk, animated to start, and when you stare at the paper...blank. Great start, junior, not a single ink mark on the page. You keep staring at it, when you realize you can’t find a way to start. Your mind floats and bang! You have a first line. Then a second and a third and a fourth and it goes.
You’re squealing like a child in excitement, you’re almost finished now! All you need is that last paragraph, the conclusion that will wrap your text and make all your readers lift their heads and stare at nothing, amazed. You almost bite your nail and rest the pen on the paper to take a deep breath. When you pick it up again and think of a way to restart, though, horror crosses your features. Nothing.
You almost gag in outrage. God, it feels even painful.
You start brainstorming, desperately searching for a single theme that will get you through the dammed conclusion and you can’t find it! Talk about frustration.
Finally giving up on torturing your brain, you start watching television. As the good old-sweats-and-fuzzy-slippers nerd you are, your target is any smart-ass TV show with sarcastic jokes and dark humor. But instead of enjoying the best distraction humanity has ever found (after sex), you pay a little too much attention to the lines, pauses, and double meanings in the script. The sarcastic jokes and dark humor then remind you oh-so-dearly of the unfinished work you have, lying on your yellowy notepad (yes, notepad, because laptops have distractions everywhere you look and notebooks have far too many lines, which makes you anxious).
And it all makes you royally pissed.
You angrily turn the TV off, moving to one of your other notepads and start doodling. First, you just run your pencil on the paper, doing nothing. Then you actually draw something stupid like a smiley face or geometric figures. You soon get tired and start to draw some of your own possessions, a key fob, for example. Yes, these are really great stuff to keep you entertained and to keep your mind out of- damn, you remembered the article, though I’m sure it didn’t forget you.
(It’s only due tomorrow morning, you say; it’s only 2 a.m., you say; you’re only dead tired, you say.)
Seeing that doodling isn’t actually the best imagination stimulator you found, you decide to write, for real this time. After all, pen on paper is the best solution: once they touch, it all flows, naturally as breathing, right?
Wrong, my friend. So very wrong. You write, and write, and write, and when you take notice, you’re not writing your beloved article (which is still there, waiting for you to finish) but a silly little piece about every single moronic act you usually do when you have a monster writer’s block.
At last, but certainly not least, you realize that scribbling said silly piece was actually a great help to your blocked mind, seeing as before you couldn’t write a line and now you have around 610 words. It cheers you up to no end and you grab your mind-splitting article, finishing it like no other could.
You feel satisfied, like after you eat a huge bar of chocolate alone. But still, all the time that you lost, counting the endless minutes you stared at nothing, now thinking about a way to end the silly piece that you started. Until you found it, of course.
I was right, all along: writer’s block is a bitch.
(I had a serious case of writer’s block during this piece.)
(Forgive any horrible mistakes, okay? English is not my first language, though I enjoy writing it.)
See this: you’re given a very important task, which constitutes in writing a detailed article about...let’s say, politics. No, not politics, anyone these days thinks they can talk about that. Well, let’s establish the article is about any important subject.
Your boss will definitely give you thumbs up if the article turns out good. So, you sit on your work desk, animated to start, and when you stare at the paper...blank. Great start, junior, not a single ink mark on the page. You keep staring at it, when you realize you can’t find a way to start. Your mind floats and bang! You have a first line. Then a second and a third and a fourth and it goes.
You’re squealing like a child in excitement, you’re almost finished now! All you need is that last paragraph, the conclusion that will wrap your text and make all your readers lift their heads and stare at nothing, amazed. You almost bite your nail and rest the pen on the paper to take a deep breath. When you pick it up again and think of a way to restart, though, horror crosses your features. Nothing.
You almost gag in outrage. God, it feels even painful.
You start brainstorming, desperately searching for a single theme that will get you through the dammed conclusion and you can’t find it! Talk about frustration.
Finally giving up on torturing your brain, you start watching television. As the good old-sweats-and-fuzzy-slippers nerd you are, your target is any smart-ass TV show with sarcastic jokes and dark humor. But instead of enjoying the best distraction humanity has ever found (after sex), you pay a little too much attention to the lines, pauses, and double meanings in the script. The sarcastic jokes and dark humor then remind you oh-so-dearly of the unfinished work you have, lying on your yellowy notepad (yes, notepad, because laptops have distractions everywhere you look and notebooks have far too many lines, which makes you anxious).
And it all makes you royally pissed.
You angrily turn the TV off, moving to one of your other notepads and start doodling. First, you just run your pencil on the paper, doing nothing. Then you actually draw something stupid like a smiley face or geometric figures. You soon get tired and start to draw some of your own possessions, a key fob, for example. Yes, these are really great stuff to keep you entertained and to keep your mind out of- damn, you remembered the article, though I’m sure it didn’t forget you.
(It’s only due tomorrow morning, you say; it’s only 2 a.m., you say; you’re only dead tired, you say.)
Seeing that doodling isn’t actually the best imagination stimulator you found, you decide to write, for real this time. After all, pen on paper is the best solution: once they touch, it all flows, naturally as breathing, right?
Wrong, my friend. So very wrong. You write, and write, and write, and when you take notice, you’re not writing your beloved article (which is still there, waiting for you to finish) but a silly little piece about every single moronic act you usually do when you have a monster writer’s block.
At last, but certainly not least, you realize that scribbling said silly piece was actually a great help to your blocked mind, seeing as before you couldn’t write a line and now you have around 610 words. It cheers you up to no end and you grab your mind-splitting article, finishing it like no other could.
You feel satisfied, like after you eat a huge bar of chocolate alone. But still, all the time that you lost, counting the endless minutes you stared at nothing, now thinking about a way to end the silly piece that you started. Until you found it, of course.
I was right, all along: writer’s block is a bitch.
(I had a serious case of writer’s block during this piece.)
(Forgive any horrible mistakes, okay? English is not my first language, though I enjoy writing it.)