The One Thing Every Writer Has Experienced Before

Writer's block.

Oh. My. Gawd.

You open the word editor, place your fingers on the keyboard, and suddenly the despair sinks in. You can't visualize the story. You can't formulate the right words. There's this thick wad of ephemeral nothingness just sitting there, preventing the flow of words that you know so well and love so much from reaching the page. You wait for a while, hoping for something to come--anything--a piece of dialogue--anything--but the wad of nothingness just seems to grow thicker, forcing you out of your own mind. Gah! You throw up your hands in the air. Writer's block strikes again!

The wad of nothingness stays there for hours on end. Sometimes it lets up and you can crank out a sentence or two, but the words seem foreign, strange, lost in translation. You try to come up with something better, but everything sucks. All those years of practice and the best you could come up with was "he smiled happily at her happy smile"!?

You walk around the house, thinking over the story, fueling your muse. Finally you can see it: the dragon, swooping down from the tower, mouth wide, tongue ensnared with wicked embers. But you can't see the sentences. You can visualize it, but the vocabulary to accompany the actions is missing. You decide to try your hand at writing it anyway.

"Teh dragon flew to the ground, opened it mouth, breathed fire and burned all the soldiers. They dropped dramatically to the ground and died. the dragon spread its wings victoriously, the end."

You feel like you wrote something. You're staring at the period; you know you just wrote something. But why are you so afraid to look at it? What the heck did you just write!? Look at it!

GAH! IT BURNS!

You delete, you retype, you delete, you retype--but dangit, there is no hope; you've digressed down the evolutionary ladder and wound up somewhere on the lower rungs.

You bang your Neanderthalian skull against the metaphorical wall, trying fruitlessly to break the block. You do this for days. You do this for weeks. You do this for months, or even years. All you end up with is a brain tumor.

You browse the web, searching for help. You find sites for helping you write better prose, articles with some ideas for writer's block, forums, books, scrolls, grimoires, tomes--but none of them help.

This wad of nothingness is impenetrable. When it appears, all hope is lost. Fighting it is fruitless.

You cannot. Beat. Writer's block. This is the one realization I've come to...realize, and it's helped me tremendously. Don't fight writer's block, because you can't beat it. The only thing you can do is get through it.

Source: http://www.streetarticles.com/creative-writing/the-one-thing-every-writer-has-experienced-before

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