Day One: I suppose it began as an over-passionate thought burned through and fizzled out before I could ever put fingers to keyboard. An overwhelming motivation to create the perfect piece for public presentation and consumption. I think I stepped out of the car after my trip to the movies ready to write up a storm; to churn up the unseasonably warm waters of imagination and creativity. But other mundane duties got in my way, such as cooking dinner. By time I could actually get my hands on my keyboard, I was too tired. I had no energy left to write. Looking back on it, I can appreciate the irony of how it began.
Day Two: I wasn't really symptomatic yet, just a minor bout of memory loss, and a growing sense of impending doom. I had all but forgotten the images of the once flaming phrases turned to ash in my head. “It's Tuesday” I thought, “Will I get this paper in on time?” I thought I had the gist of it down, but come Tuesday night, my fingers failed to sew the seeds of thought, and the paper became an issue for Wednesday.
Day Three: By Wednesday, it was full blown writer's block. The essay loomed like a lonely, vinegar-filled rain cloud over my day, soaking everything I touched with a sort of sourness. While things like depression and boredom began to stir, anger and a full-body irritation were the two most prevalent symptoms. The deadline for getting the essay in on time had already passed, which, compounded with my writer's block, made me irritable all day. Wednesday night came along and I tried the Essay once more, and once more a failure. I went to bed with a bleak outlook for Thursday.
Day Four: Thursday greeted me with what seemed like relief from some of my symptoms. I was up and about, going to class and being productive. I had completely placed my Essay on the back burner because other things of import had to be done. But as my productivity waned, my symptoms came back to me stronger than before. The depressive feeling of the unfinished work returned, and by time I sat down to write again, my symptoms included paralysis and blindness. My fingers couldn't move across the keyboard. They were cramped up swimmers who couldn't kick their legs to stay afloat in a sea of untyped words. And as hard as I would stare at that computer screen, I couldn't see a word. Not one word typed, or even a threat of a word anywhere on the horizon.
Day Five: Friday came with a frenzied feeling of desperation. Everything I looked at, or everything that happened was taken in by me through a sort of filter. Before I could really process any information, I first asked myself, “Can I blog about this?” Everything from my trip to Wal-Mart, to the massive collection of junk that sits around my laptop under went this same scrutiny. Unlike days past, my limbs seemed to come to life, a second wind of sorts. I went into a scavenging mode, trying to salvage parts of ideas from everything and anything. By now I had been sitting in front of my computer for so long I was experiencing lower back pain. Friday night came and I began to dry heave. My body tried to purge itself of all of the ideas jumbled up within, but nothing came out. I couldn't regurgitate a single idea onto paper. I Fell asleep Friday night without a single word typed.
Day Six: Saturday began right where Friday left off, but it appeared as if I had passed through the worst of it. As the day crept on I began to feel idea flare-ups. Thoughts would come in clusters, “Write about this, Blog about that.” My mind flung out ideas like clay pigeons, only to shoot them all down, one by one, at the apex of their flight, but this was at least progress. I'm still in the throws of writer's block, but instead of those feelings of desperation or inertness, I began to feel relief. I hadn't cured what ailed me, but I started to treat the symptoms. It was the simplest, but only available solution to my problem: To write about how I had nothing to write about. I had used this before to treat my writer's block, so I decided to turn to it again. Writer's block could probably be considered an an auto-immune disease, where your mind attacks it's own ideas, crippling itself.
Despite the fact that nobody reads the blogs until the day before/day of (0 comments on all workshop essays so far, point proven), somebody is going to bring this lateness up as a "problem." But here I think it actually works to help the piece, for our class at least, as it made the writer's block you discussed more tangible. I know it's an outside force and essays are, in the best case, judged on their own merits, but context can still make a work more powerful for a certain group. Office Space might be funny for everyone, but office workers will get more of a kick out of it.
ReplyDeleteWell thank you, and yes, I took a sort of sordid delight in writing this as it is both an essay written about the inability to write essays, and an excuse for why I turned it in late.
ReplyDeleteWriting about writers block is something I always do as a desperate last resort to free myself from the self inflicted disease called writers block, and it's never failed yet. It just allows me to release all that pent up steam and jumble of half formed thoughts that are crammed in my head that I can't figure out how to put into sentences. More often than not I'll just delete the writers block venting after I've written it, but that simple of act of finally writing seems to be the cure for that terrible disease. You do a great job of describing the agony of it here.
ReplyDeletesuch good imagery here. I liked all the comparisons to the symtoms your body and brain were going through. I think the comparisons were the strongest part of this piece. I actually read on to see what other connections your were going to make. It actually made for a really creative piece. Also while I was reading this I kept thinking, How the hell are we ever going to talking about this in class? Can't wait for Christmas morning :)
ReplyDeleteI have to admit, that this essay was a little depressing. The repetition of failure was overwhelming at times!
ReplyDelete