the best cure for writer’s block

Hey, kids. Need a way to perk up your languishing blog? Might I suggest a terrible tragedy, or, hey – a month full of melodramatic sorrow and pain? It’ll bring that blog right back like gangbusters!

Seriously. I guess it’s a coping method. Bad things happen, and all I want to do is write. Actually, I should say it’s all I can do. I have to write it out. I write my sorrow and confusion. I write my pain and my rage. I write my questions and my worries and my musings and my what-ifs and my bizarro world trains of thought. I write it all. My eyes and ears and fingertips are brimming with the things I must write. I write on napkins, on post-it notes, in emails to myself, in Word documents saved without titles. I write into the doodles I’m doodling at meetings. I compose bits of text in my head while I’m watching TV, showering, driving, trying to fall asleep. Some of it’s crap. Some of it’s really damn good. A lot of it I don’t feel like I can share here in this public place, for lots of reasons. It’s overkill. It’ll make you question my sanity. It’ll hurt the people I love. It’s not as good as I think it is. Whatever. I’m holding back, is all. You should probably be thankful for that. My brain will not turn off. It churns and churns and churns while I try to process everything that’s happened, and all I can do is write.

It would probably be good if I could channel this energy into something like cleaning house or going to the gym or whatever, but I’m a writer and I recognize that, right now, writing is what I must do. It’d be great if I had this burning urge to write when things were going well. I would love to find a way to harness the creativity and need I feel when I’m in turmoil, so that I could write the same way of happier things, in happier times. Because things are going to get better. Things can only get better. Howard Jones said so.

But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. I get a really hard month of my life, and you all get fresh content. Sad and oftentimes overblown and melodramatic content? Well, yeah, but it’s content. So take it for what it’s worth.