Blockages
I’ve spent hours recently staring at a wretchedly blank screen. I’ve passed 100,000 words on my monsterpiece and now that I’m on the home stretch I have a cramp in my leg. Yeah, I know, baseball analogies only work if you like baseball. But whatever, it’s my blog.
I’ve tried housework, I’ve tried walking, hell I’ve tried that authourly fall-back position of alcohol (shh, don’t tell the Man of the House) and none of it has gotten me anywhere. It’s not that I don’t know what to do with the story. I know exactly what needs to happen between now and the end of the book. I just can’t write it.
I’m trying not to call it writer’s block. While I don’t go to the extreme of saying that it doesn’t exist, I think it’s an overused excuse. This block has nothing to do with me as a writer and everything to do with me as a person. I don’t finish things. I am a non-finisher. I am a great starter. I can start with the best of them. I just don’t seem to want to finish this thing. I know why, too. If I finish it, I’m going to have to do something with it. Sure, there are things that need doing between finishing the first draft and sending it to a publisher (well, half a hundred publishers and probably still not getting any joy).
So here I am, staring at my pen-holder and thinking to myself, tourists know how ripped off they are, right? When I was in NZ, after the Glayva-and-Life night at Sulfurous Winds from Below’s house, we went to some thermal valley a little way out of Rotorua. I don’t remember the name. It doesn’t matter. There’s dozens of thermal wonderlands in and around Rotorua and I doubt things are different at any of them. Anyway, we got to the gift shop at the end (which you almost have to pass through, great marketing ploy) and I spotted a display of fernware. I call it fernware because if it was made from glass it’d be glassware but it’s not, it’s made from fern. These things started at $25 each and made their way skywards from there. I was shocked. My pen-holder is fernware and do you know how much it cost me? 50c. It cost me half of one dollar. A comparable piece in that gift shop was $27. How insane is that?
See? I don’t have writer’s block. I can write. I just can’t write my monsterpiece.
Thank God I’m going back to uni next year.
Tagged: Writing.