Let It Ride

I’ve never struggled with writer’s block. If I need to sit down and churn something out, I will. And if you don’t believe me, just flip through the months and months of blog posts offered in the sidebar. You may not know this but I’ve posted twice a week since the start. It’s a rule I made for myself. I mean, if I’m here to become a better writer, I better fucking write.

Of course, some pieces are stronger than others. And for the most part, anything I wrote before June of 2006 qualifies as crap. But, in my defense, I was learning. I hadn’t written creatively for three years. It makes sense my style was choppy and my dialog sputtered. Heck, it took me almost a year to defy my formal education and comfortably use contractions in my prose. But I kept to my schedule because without it, I would never improve.

So while I’ve never struggled with writer’s block, I’ve most certainly struggled with writer’s indifference. It’s a mopey presence of the whatevers. I lack the itch to type words. There’s a void when it comes to plot and character, location and arc. It isn’t so much that I have nothing to say but that, according to me, I have nothing worthwhile to produce.

When I came back from Maine in mid-July, I was drained. I was bone dry, splat flat, brain dead drained. I had nothing left in me. It seems nine days of intensive workshopping, while quite enlightening, is the equivalent of being bled by leeches. You start optimistic and eventually fade to a catatonic fog.

“Send me something you’ve written!” Eliza, a classmate, pleaded over the phone.

“Um, I haven’t written anything,” I confessed. “But I’ve been reading!” I noted, as if that would justify my failure to pen a single sentence in the four weeks since returning home.

In the meantime, Eliza was feeding me brilliant flash fiction on a regular basis. Actually, brilliant might be an understatement. Where I falter, Eliza thrives. She doesn’t describe the bustling avenues of Manhattan, she puts you on them. You can smell the bus fumes wafting up Broadway. You can hear the taxis wailing their horns as they slalom through traffic. When a character pops her gum, the reader can taste the sugar and feel the snap. Eliza has a magical way with description. And the more I read her pieces, the more indifferent I became about writing my own.

You see, I write when I feel the need. If I’m lying in bed at two in the morning and I have an idea, I get up, turn on my laptop and peck at the keys. Or if I’m on a train and a character twist comes to me, I repeat it in my head like a crazy person until I can write it out. Because when I feel inspired, I know I have something. Even if it’s nothing more than a two-line stretch of dialog, if it makes my spine tingle or my mouth curl to a smile, I’m confident I’m going somewhere good. Conversely, when that doesn’t happen, when I observe a couple fighting and feel nothing or when I finish a chat with Leslie and don’t recall anything specific, I know there’s no reason to write from it. Sure, I can create something. It’s the difference between scratchy shetland and supple cashmere, cheap naugahyde and buttery soft leather. There’s a need for all of it but I don’t want to be a producer of the former. Ever.

On August 25th, my assigned mentor is supposed to have my first packet of twenty-five typed pages in his hands. He lives in New York and requests that students forward printed copies via snail mail. Backing into the deadline, I need to send my packet by next Wednesday. And as of yesterday morning I had nothing to submit. Well, I had a three-page critical analysis of an assigned book but the remaining twenty-two pages of creative prose were empty.

Then, out of nowhere, it came to me. A line floated across my mind as I rinsed shampoo from my hair. With suds rolling down my skin and my eyes clenched closed, I heard a sentence in a slow syrupy southern drawl:

Mamma’s what I call a keeper and maybe that’s why she’s been keeping Daddy around these last few years.

I’m not Southern. I don’t call my mother Mamma and I surely don’t call my father Daddy. But there it was, a beginning that made my heart flutter.

Bedecked in a towel turban and intimates, I typed one paragraph at home. I just needed to get it started. Then I went to work where, for the first hour, I ignored everything and wrote more. That’s when I knew I had to cancel my dinner plans with Bess. Because when I’m in it, when the sentences stream faster than I can type, I need to go with it. When the characters are alive, when the conversation is crisp, walking away from the keyboard is the worst thing I can do.

As the clock ticked toward eight, the office quiet and the sun dipping below the horizon, I was done. I wasn’t finished but I was done. Meaning there’s plenty of room to improve and rework. But when I clicked save, I knew I had something.

That’s how I know I don’t need to worry about my writer’s indifference. Those lulls never make me sweat. I don’t nervously check my watch or nibble my nails. I just embrace the quiet and I wait. I linger on my sofa with a pile of books and New Yorkers or I relax on my balcony with scissoring knitting needles, a ball of yarn and a glass of wine or I finger the Goretex at REI and smell cartons of raspberries at Wholefoods. I fill the time. Because eventually, just like it always does, it’ll happen.