When You Don’t Write By Amy Lane
I’m going to say something that may get shit thrown at me from all quarters of the globe.
I don’t get writer’s block. * ducks* *runs * *hides *
Now, writers think that’s a blessing—and very often it is!—but it’s not really a “gift” or an “accident” so much as it is a “personality defect of the highest order”.
It’s like exercise.
I mean, I’m a big girl—always have been—but I walk every day and go to the gym three days a week for aqua class. I have always found some way to be active.
However, studies have shown that I’d be much better off if I cleaned house more, and activity was more integrated into my life and less modularly enforced—like the New Yorker who has to walk from point A to point B every frickin day, just to get to work, to lunch, or to the laundry room.
And it’s the same thing with writing.
I sit down and I write. Sometimes I write non-fiction (waves!) and sometimes I write fiction (waves from my newest release photo 😉 and sometimes I blog—but I sit down. And I write.
I do not plan for Christmas, clean the house, plan parties, plan birthdays for my kids, plan vacations, plan decorations of any kind, plan my weekends, plan sewing projects, or envision dinner.
When I’m taking a break, I may plan my knitting—but that’s it.
My brain is dedicated to one track. Period. The end. Holidays, children’s birthdays, the change of the seasons, the festering disaster of my refrigerator, the fact that I haven’t had a family photo taken in years–all of it is lost to the driving, one track modular thinking that is my brain in writing mode.
It’s not a comfortable thing, necessarily.
People tell me that when they have writer’s block, their house has never been cleaner. They cook and freeze soup for days and sew. They watch television with their kids and finish knitting projects and plan new decorating schemes and refinish the bathroom or the bedroom or get new shelves for the kitchen.
They do not stare at a little screen for hours at a time and let the world whiz by their ears at the same speed as the earth’s rotation around the sun.
And I think, “I wish I could do that.”
In order for me to function rationally, I have to force myself away from the glowing screen and into the world. I have to pick up my kids and enquire about their day. (Sometimes repetitively—I’ve asked Squish six times what she wants for Christmas because it just hasn’t stuck yet.) I have to take the dogs for a walk or go grocery shopping (although if I’m not careful, grocery shopping is a perilous thing–my brain is writing and my body is just chucking food into the cart—you buy a lot of Oreos and frozen pizza that way.) I have to set a timer so I can go sit with my family and watch television.
I have to strive to conquer my human block because my writing world is ever so much more comforting.
So as you all plan your Christmases and pull out sewing machines or plan excursions or great meals, be grateful. You may not be writing—you may even dread writing—but writing is a small, modular part of your lives at this point, and that is not a bad thing. When it takes over your brains like a runaway amoeba, like a cheerful cancer, sucking away the other parts of your humanness, you are filled with a sort of baffled hurt.
This is a thing I love—how can it be interfering with all of the other things I love?
You become grateful for stupid things—the refrigerator going bad before Thanksgiving, for instance. It pulls you out of yourself, forces you to interact with the real world, forces you to abandon the intricacies of your own mind in order to make life marginally livable for the people in your home.
You start making dates with your husband to run errands—you cannot get lost writing at the grocery store if you are with him, planning your everyday life. You cannot forget Christmas and birthdays if he is with you shopping. (This also helps you save money—at least it helps me. My husband is sort of judgey with that whole spending thing. If I’m putting something in the cart under his gimlet eye, it had better be something people want.)
You start planning pockets of time to be with your kids—in spirit as well as in hulking, laptop-enhanced body. You think that you would like them to remember you in ten Christmases or so, when this writing madness has faded. Squish always gets her hair braided. Zoomboy always hugs me before bed.
I’m sure the last thing that other writers want to hear is to be grateful for writer’s block—so I’m not going to say that. But be grateful that your brain gives you the opportunity to concentrate on other things. Because the worlds inside our head are magnificent and infinite—but the worlds that surround our body are personal and finite. You can’t touch an imaginary lover or play with an imaginary child—it is so very very necessary that those things be maintained and “worked on” with as much passion as we put into our writing.
Writing is—at its best and most important form—a kind of human connection. If we can’t connect with our humans in other basic ways, how will our writing ever ring true?
Check out Amy’s new upcoming release “Winter Ball”
