writer’s block

posted by Hatty

I haven’t considered myself a writer long enough to name what I think I’m going through right now. When you know you must write and feel like you have so much to say, and you sit down to do just that, and you get… nothing. Or worse, you get something, and it’s shit.

Political commentaries I’ve read incessantly in the justification of educating myself only makes me feel gross, fat with the junk of this world. They neither offer any real solution to the real problem – godlessness – nor stir up true repentance and compassion in me. Mainly they are a distraction from writing, not an inspiration to. What is the point of this then? What good comes out of my obsession with “writing?” Do I offer anything? To anyone? To God?

There are thoughts that come – surely they’ve come upon millions of others just like me – meriting paper and ink. Some don’t deserve but still get the attention. Some ache for preservation, yet evaporate too quickly. I’m all too familiar with lofty words and poetic sentences that disappear upon waking, feeling sober again.

So what do we do then…?

How do we keep producing when the creativity in us looks like a lump of coals? Burned up and sucked dry? Empty?

Maybe I’ll go back to my old short stories half finished. Maybe I’m supposed to try sticking with my characters: all of them pitiable, all of them too close to home, all of them carrying my genes somewhere in the alternate universe I’ve unlocked. I remember Joan in my Oakland studio, the Egyptian barista, Francis and Simone in British Columbia. They all tried to be themselves but in the end echoed words out of my mouth. I’m not an actor. I don’t know how to say things I don’t believe. I can’t tell stories I haven’t lived. No matter how much research I do on divorce, on Palestine, on yuppy singlehood, unless there’s an inkling of home for me there, whatever I write of these people will never sound like the real thing. Whatever I write will ultimately bleed my blood, not that of a made up character from New York and in love.

I wonder. When everything we produce, everything we create, everything we think we originate only resemble a child’s collage of ages come and gone – if nothing is really new under the sun – I wonder why anybody would care to listen.

But the stupid truth is that I already know the answers. I’ve already asked and resolved it in my heart to continue writing anyway. We all have, we writers.

So how about this Hatty? You finish, or at least revisit, one of your old stories/poems, and we’ll walk it through some workshops somewhere again. We’ll read it sometime somewhere soon. Let’s revive the writers gathering. Let’s go to some slams once more. Let’s not let the writer’s block get the best of us. Deal? Yes. Deal