And the dam breaks? On blockades of many sorts…

For any writer (or aspiring writer), there is always this occasional feeling of having a mind completely devoid of creative inspiration. I like to refer to this as the writer’s blockade. It isn’t a mere issue of searching for the write words (yes, that was intentional), feeling that there are an overwhelming flood of ideas waiting for your feeble vocabulary to give them shape and form… no. It is a full blown, beautifully empty blank where upon no amount of prodding, poking, free-flowing, and rambling seem to dislodge anything coherent.

Many of my writer friends have complained about this sensation of having nothing on which to expound. There is nothing so elusive as the creative impetus that decides to go walkabout without any notice. I mean, really? It isn’t as if I lost the English language in there somewhere, right? The hours become days. The days become weeks, and suddenly you find that you haven’t written a post, piece, or paragraph in months. The obstructions of the blockade can take on varied forms… and often, they are as individual as those they plague.

For instance, I spent the last three weeks working on a post that had presented itself to my mind months ago. I struggled with this, and it still reads like dog poo on the bottom of my favorite boots. The sentences stilted and the vocabulary just clunky and unnatural. I honestly cannot figure it out. At other times, the words seem to flow of their own volition out of the tips of my fingers (maybe a case for possession?). Then, at other times I cannot seem to put an idea worthy of the letters into any form. The muse has departed… apparently for another zip code, possibly a different state, another country, left the planet entirely? I’ve had some brilliant (well I thought they were) ideas while driving, in the middle of a session, during a meeting while I was presenting on something else entirely, or possibly at 4:00AM when a 10 pound demonic feline decides to apply all of his weight into a focused area directly on my boob… However, when I later approach an actual keyboard at a more convenient and appropriate time… poof! David Copperfield couldn’t have made anything disappear that well. It is a good argument, I suppose for having a voice recorder of some sort close by at any time to capture these thoughts before they seem to evaporate and blow away like so much smoke. But I can already see how that would turn out. When the recordings are listened to later, what I thought was perfectly intelligible speech with creative inspiration summons a demon or opens a hellmouth.

The worst part is that I generally fail to recall even the topics in the vaguest manner. It concerns me that perhaps my short term to long term memory transfer process is starting to get a little fragile. I really am not ready for that particular issue yet. Or maybe it is just that I have too much data trying to be stored in a finite space. Well, hell… my hard drives are full… or maybe corrupted. Bad sector, format C. Perhaps it is a symptom of descending madness… they do say that there is a fine line between that and genius, right? Ok, maybe that is pushing it. I don’t believe that genius is one of my failings. However, I must be grateful for small favors, I have not yet started singing nursery rhymes in my head or subjecting you to them (with a special shout out to my dear friend)… Oops. There I go… Mary had a little… dammit, Tess!

 

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