Writers Block

As I hope is clear from my ongoing efforts here, and from my stated efforts in The Rules (and also in some shit that you don’t get to know about), I fancy myself a little bit of a writer. Not a writer of books or novels or anything like that; as I’ve stated here before, I think the best job in literature is not the novelist, it’s the columnist. Imagine a job where your required work product is three pages of good shit every week, and where - so long as you come up with those pages - you can work from anywhere there is an internet connection that you can email your work product in from. Yeah. That would be nice. Spend one week polishing a column on the history of the St. James Gate Brewery while AT the St. James Gate Brewery. Then head off to Cancun (or Paris, or Venice, or Fiji, or wherever) to write a column on The Perfect Margarita (or on European politics, Italian history, Pacific Inland culture, or whatever).

But even in small doses, as a blog, a hypothetical column, or a Rule and its Explanation, it turns out that writing is hard work. Not necessarily the physical act of writing. Once you spend a few years at it, you find that you can type about as fast as you can talk. The problem is not coming up with ideas, either. I have literally thousands of pages of shit where the ideas are already there. Where they don’t really need to be written, they just need to be written DOWN. In a world as fucked up as ours, subject matter is definitely there for anyone paying attention to opine on. So coming up with blog ideas is really not a problem either.

The problem is coming up with work that is an encapsulated whole, which a reader can digest in a single sitting. As you may have noticed, some of these blog postings are fairly short, and in print would only be a few pages. Other posts... not so much. For me, over-expression is sometimes a problem. I like to think that my tendency towards intricate posts and inclusion of tangential materials is a result of my mind naturally considering most intellectual issues as inter-related. But to be honest, I’d have to admit that my verbosity is more likely a result of the fact that I like the sound of my own voice. It would be nice to make a living at it, but even without that, this blog alone is concrete proof that I will write for no other reason than that I hope someone will read it, and enjoy it.

But coming up with something that people will enjoy almost always means coming up with some sort of encapsulated whole. Stream of consciousness will only get you so far before people will start expecting some sort of structured message. The difference between reality and writing is that writing needs to make sense. In short: you have to have a point, and ideally, it needs to be a point that people will enjoy and/or relate to.

The reason that I haven’t been posting much lately is that my mind has been too scattered to complete anything as an encapsulated whole. (It’s certainly not that I haven’t been writing.) Part of it is the ongoing thing where after spending all day at work, sitting at a computer and writing, I really don’t want to get home at the end of the day and spend more time sitting at a computer and writing. But most of it is that I keep on starting on some topic or other, then digress away from the topic to the point where I cannot tie any sort of acceptable conclusion back in to the originally intended topic or point of the work. This is not a new phenomenon, for me. I’ve been saying this since my days as a writing tutor, but the key to coming up with good ideas is digression. If you sit down and start writing, you will - sooner or later - come up with some idea that is absolutely brilliant. You will know it when you see it. Then all you have to do is restructure (or discard and completely redo) the work so it focuses on whatever that brilliant idea is. So long as ideas are flowing from your mind into the world (ideally, onto paper), you will eventually come up with good stuff. If nothing else, there’s the thing about an infinite number of monkeys endlessly pounding on typewriters re-creating the works of Bill Shakespeare. But there’s also the fact that so long as you keep thinking, you will eventually think of something interesting that perhaps HASN’T been written before. The problem with this strategy is that when you hang your hat on digression, it’s sometimes hard to stop digressing. That’s were writing starts being hard work: when the creativity stage is largely over. You have the ideas, and have a basic form of the work, and all you have to do is keep grinding away at them until the expression on the paper looks like a reasonable facsimile of the amorphous concepts in your head. Takes quite a bit of focus, discipline, and/or just the right level of intoxication.

I haven’t been able to focus very well lately. People have been asking me lately to post new stuff, but I’m having problems doing it. Even though the ideas are there (in spades), and even though the effort (at least some effort) to write is being made, nothing has been coming together, and I haven’t been working enough to MAKE things come together. Just been too distracted. Too much going on. And not just the job thing, or my playing/coaching with a semi-pro sports team. In fact, work and hockey are among the things I use to distract myself from the things that are really distracting me from writing.

In the last few months - which few months seem to have lasted a thousand years - I’ve rediscovered something that had been missing from my life. Missing for over a decade, in fact. Most or all of my readers will know what I’m talking about, and will also know why I really can’t/won’t go into the details right now. But I can’t believe how long it took me to notice what was missing, and how much different my life seems for having rediscovered it. But this is me we’re talking about, and we all know that things are NOT going to be simple.

What it really comes down to is that the status quo (both of my life and others’ lives) has recently been shattered in moderately spectacular fashion, and everyone involved is in the process of dealing with the chaos that ensues in the absence of a status quo. While there is no doubt that things will settle into some new status quo, that’s not happening quite yet, and will not be happening for several months at least. Angles need to be considered. Due diligence needs to be performed. As fun as it would be to simply abandon all the drama and flee to somewhere tropical, being an adult means recognizing that it is a much better choice to put off fleeing to tropical places until after angles are considered and after due diligence is completed. The tropical places will still be there, and you can actually get there with peace of mind intact, so long as you keep chipping away at the angles and diligence. That’s the goal. For people to reach a status quo where they can be right in their minds with that status quo. Hopefully, happiness for everyone can flow from there.

In the meantime, there’s really not a whole lot I can do to assist in the resolution of Things into an acceptable status quo. Honestly speaking, my status quo is not the one in upheaval. I’ve completed my consideration of angles and due diligence. As I won’t try to speed others towards the conclusion of their own due diligence, this leaves me at loose ends vis-a-vis intellectual consideration of the scenario, which means that the only thing I can do is spend a lot of time thinking about it. Wondering how things might go. Thinking about how great or terrible the end result might be. It is fairly possible that my life might undergo some fairly drastic changes in the not-too-distant future as things shake out. I’m positively giddy about where things might go, and at the same time aware (and afraid) that things might go nowhere at all, and that the net result will be me falling back into the status quo I’ve been in for the last few years. Much of that is simply beyond my control. I can see so many possibilities, but realization of those possibilities requires actions which are not mine to either undertake, or even mine to opine on the actions others should undertake. Timing has never been my strong point in general, and has always been a week point in the current context, so things are still in the process of either working out, or not working out.

Thus, my mind is abuzz. And I have a hard time focusing on anything for long. Too many wheels spinning too fast in too many directions, with the practical result that I have writers block. Not only do I not know where to go with my thoughts and diatribes, but I’m having problems focusing on any specific thought or diatribe for long enough to get anything coherent onto paper. Funny that, for me, writers block grows from overabundance of thoughts. But whatever; that’s where I’m at, and that’s why none of my many recent writings have found there way here.

As with everything else in life, this too shall pass. While I have hopes that Things might work out in such a way a to leave me on top of the world, I also have fears that Things might work out to leave me in an indefinite disappointed depression, and I also have the knowledge that the most likely result is something between those two. But either way, this too shall pass. Good times shall come again, and might be brighter than they have ever been before. Things will work out, one way or the other. If they work out the way I hope they will, I plan to spend quite a bit of time in a tropical place drinking and having a good time. If they work out the way I fear they might... I plan to spend quite a bit of time in a tropical place drinking and trying to have a good time.

But either way, a new status quo will form out of the chaos that has arisen in my life, and in the lives of those I love. This too shall pass. Events will resolve, become history, and thereby turn into some sort of encapsulated whole that I might or might not be able to write about. But until then, I’m not sure how much new material will be finding its way onto these pages.