“I DECIDED THAT AFTER FINDING MYSELF

INCAPABLE OF WRITING IT WAS TIME TO

EXPLORE THE BEAST ITSELF …”

THOUGHTS ON
WRITER’S BLOCK

“Every morning I would sit down before a blank

sheet of paper. Throughout the day, with a brief in-
terval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet.
Often when evening came it was still empty… it
seemed quite likely that the whole of the rest of my
life might be consumed in looking at that blank
sheet of paper.”

BERTRAND RUSSELL
 My words speak for themselves, and not for me,
pursuing some incomprehensible agenda of there own;
They come and go as they will, often stubbornly
denying me even the illusion of control.

I decided that after finding myself incapable of writing it was Time to ex-
plore the beast itself … the Mind of the Author.

I have been suffering against a severe case of “writers block” for some
time now, a period of about a year, a seeming eternity. I have tried to cover
my malady by dispensing out old writings, packaging epigrammatic sen-
tences – from my Day Book – with a common thread, offering mere out-
lines of ideas as if they were complete and, finally, uploading sundry digital
images with short poetic titles, but even with these tricks my output has
been dwindled to a trickle.

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit

staring at a blank sheet of paper until
drops of blood form on your forehead.”
– Gene Fowler

Writing is a solitary vice, like masturbation except the seed, the payoff,
that comes spewing out is in the form of words.

I turn my Words loose upon the World hoping that after everything has
been said, it is then that I will know a release.

It’s a fraught moment, this turning loose … after watching them grow up
from syllables, you release your words, set them free … will they return for
a visit, maybe drop you a line?

What of my progeny, do they return for a visit or drop me a line as often

as I hoped? Not as often as I would like! And release … that still keeps
eluding me, always staying just beyond reach, perhaps it is a mirage.

I dream of a time, a someday, that I will not feel compelled to write …

that I will have found the final release. But, until that dreamed for, and
maybe imaginary time, I find myself feeling words to be written constantly
struggling unsuccessfully for release, struggling against the static of life’s
small annoyances …

It started this way: Writing with ease … new stor-

ies … new poetry … perfecting older work … the
words flowing until my laptop suffers a catastrophic
system failure.

There were warning signs – the Laptop, for in-

scrutable reasons, powers down or suddenly
freezes, requiring an ill advised forced shut down
and reboot.

Each time, upon restart, the laptop picks up from

were I left off, well mostly so anyway … until this
time. This time I push the power switch and the com-
puter starts up, seemingly normal, but before com-
pleting the reboot twitches back, suddenly, to the be-
ginning … it is caught in a loop that reminds me of a
dying animal’s desperate death throes.

I did succeed in reinstalling the operating system,

but with this animal death everything since my last,
too distant, backup disappeared, precipitating a mal-
aise of discouragement and apathy aided and abet-
ted by the aforementioned “small annoyances.”

Once the malaise set in no small annoyance was

too small to sap my will to write … I awaken, already
in a foul mood; it takes two hours to gather the en-
ergy to make a pot of coffee.

Even that became a time wasting failure; I turned

away from the coffee pot and its the filter basket
clogs, dribbling a soggy pool of grounds and weak
coffee across the counter.

I spend the morning cleaning up the mess … an-

other barrier set in the way of putting black smudges
on pale pieces of blank paper.
 Bertrand Russel, the philosopher, wrote of a time in his life, when he
was struggling the apparent contradictions of his logic, that could very well
be a description of one struggling against Writer’s Block:

“Every morning I would sit down before

a blank sheet of paper. Throughout the
day, with a brief interval for lunch, I
would stare at the blank sheet. Often
when evening came it was still empty …
it seemed quite likely that the whole
of the rest of my life might be con-
sumed in looking at that blank sheet of
paper.” – Bertrand Russel

Like Russel, I stare at that blank sheet, that Tabula Rasa; it waits for me
to fill its blankness and impeaches me because I don’t. There is something
frightening about the absolute permissiveness of the blankness and its de-
mands that I draw, in black smudges, meaning upon it. I long to accept its
blankness, to let it be.

I know that there is something within me that

wants to let it, that blank paper, be … because I
have been entranced, mesmerized, by the
shapes outside of the words, the black smudges,
on the page.

A page seen at a distance, the words no more

than an anonymous gray smudge, seems to tug
at my mind with the promise that more is to be
learned from the white space surrounding my
smudges than the smudges themselves.

Poetry: I am hypnotized by the void shape left out-

"I fancy that I can recognize my
poems from their shape ..."
side of my chatty words and I fancy that I can recog-
nize my poems from their shape … as if it is a part of
my voice, my message. Prose: I follow the paths –
starting, parting and then rejoining –traced by the
white space that percolate through the words of my
paragraphs … where do these paths lead?
 I fantasize of a proper hearing, a hearing that hears the silence sur-
rounding the drone of finely worded opinions, maybe then I would find the
answers to those important questions, the longings of my soul that resist
my words.

Who knows who I could meet there – maybe you for the first time re-
leased from my unreasoned prejudices and judgments … maybe God fi-
nally unchained of my words, my over reasoned theologies?

Would I then discover that the most important things I’ve said, are those
things I didn’t say … captured by the white spaces of my pages and the si-
lent moments between my words. Would I then discover the dreamed of fi-
nal release; would I be at peace with a blank piece of paper?

CAN YOU HEAR WHAT I SEE?

© B. W. Reed (10th & 13th of December, 2010)