On Tuesday, I mentioned to Brenda that I don't really seem to run into writer's block. The following morning, I found myself staring at a nearly blank screen, with roughly half a sentence written, on an important short project with a looming deadline. It's not a paying project, mind you--let's not get crazy--but it is something I need to do, something I need to do well, and something I need to do now. So much for hubris.
But it's okay. I know the basics of what I want to write, even if I couldn't quite capture it early Wednesday. When that happens, I leave it and come back to it. In this case, I watched one (1) TV show, went out to accomplish my errands, and returned to the computer in the afternoon. After I finish the piece you're reading now, I will return to the main project and complete a first draft. That will have already been accomplished before you see these words. [POSTSCRIPT: That is true.]
I'm not a full-time writer, at least not in the sense of having to meet professional deadlines on a regular basis. I'm a hobbyist, but I'm still writing all the time, whether in my head or on my screen. I maintain the care and feeding of this blog's ravenous daily schedule, I tend to my book, I tend to my short stories, and a body of work accumulates. It's not Proust, but it's not bad.
When I was a younger writer, aged 15 to, say, 30 or 31, I used to sweat the perfection of the typed word, hoping to avoid white-out and rewrites. Word processing programs set me free. Since the early '90s, I've been able to sketch in ideas just as easily as I used to sketch renderings of Batman in my art pad. I can let words, phrases, ideas, impressions, silly jokes, and leaps of freakin' faith flow, captured on the screen for me to come back and rearrange at will. The training I had in my ol' Smith-Corona days, of trying to write a first draft that could serve as a finished final master, serves me well now; sometimes the stream-of-consciousness that invades the screen doesn't need all that much tweaking. And sometimes it's junk that needs to be discarded and replaced with new garba...writing. Either way, with the removal of the intimidating factor of the unforgiving blank page, the mind swells with the delight and possibility of creation.
I love writing. I used to parrot Dorothy Parker's preference for only loving having written, but no, now I enjoy the process itself. I don't have a lot of concrete real-world success to show for it, but I love it anyway. And writer's block? The only known cure for writer's block is...writing something. Now please excuse me; I have a White Album I need to sketch in.
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