My friend and art-partner-in-crime, Marcia, has been sending me articles about writer's block for the last couple of days, with no explanation. This is like sending a musician an article about one-hit wonders. I mean, never mind that I can't get into the Author's Guild to get insurance because I haven't had a book published yet. Bad enough I'm angsting about that. Now she's got to remind me that there's always the danger of writer's block? When I've got four stories going at the same time and know exactly how to finish them, and yet can't force myself to do it because it's that workman part of the story, the getting from here to there conjunction part of the story that's not very exciting to write. Never mind that, thanks to this blog and my new job, I'm actually probably writing more than I have at any time since graduate school, maybe more than I ever have (and occasionally, it's actually pretty good). What up with that?
The idea of writer's block terrifies me, as I'm sure it terrifies every single writer anywhere. I won't call what I had during my first five years in New York writer's block; it was more like a mental and physical exhaustion brought on by a full-time job coupled with part-time graduate school. But I think I only wrote about a half-dozen poems and no fiction at all during that whole time. And when I was writing my novel, sitting down in front of the blank screen every morning was terrifying, even though I usually came away with 15 pages or so at the end of the day. Always, in the back of your head, you're wondering (or I am, anyway): have I run out of ideas?
This is one of the things that amazes me about Marcia: ideas just tumble out of her like a waterfall. Everything you say to her seems to spark something. Of course, the price she pays for that is a permanent relationship with Zoloft, so there's a downside to everything, I suppose. Still, I'd rather have that, I think, than to be completely dry. It's enough to drive one to drink.
Bartender!
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