Writer's Block

The most excruciating moments in life are when you are sitting down with a pen and your notebook, or perhaps staring at a blank Microsoft word document, cursing yourself because you know all the words you will ever need to fill that space is right inside you and for some reason summoning them before your eyes seems to be the toughest task to do.

From the day I discovered that writing was what I wanted to do with my life, there've been several such moments. I've found myself struggling with the words that make sense to me inside my head but sound different when they appear in print. I've found myself wondering what happened to all the emotions and inspiration that inspire me to write. I'm found myself praying to the gods to help me find my muse. All…so many times.

I have however, never really been able to figure, what it is that leaves me with that blank screen. While I've often found that emotional phases in life have been very good for my writing- even turbulent times- I've also realized that sometimes, life is so full of suffering, you suddenly seem to lose the capacity for writing, to that pain. It sucks in your ability to produce. So, it's a little confusing actually. I can't decide whether I feed on emotionally turbulent phases for my writing or if they shut me out.

What I do know though is that the nature and depth of the phases matter. Some phases destroy you, killing your ability to identify with your writing self. That's when I feel blank. Some experiences have been emotionally pitched in a way that makes me want to offer it something. And what better way to do that, than writing?! I like to give my best to such moments and I offer it, the favourite side of myself- my writing.

A good piece of writing has organized thoughts. My greatest difficulty is to organize my ideas and thoughts into chronology. Once that is done, I find that I can find a flow to tell my readers, the story. But as long as I haven't decided what and how to say it, I find it difficult to write. So, what I do is, often, create a pattern in my head. Organize it in a structure that appears something like subtitles for pictures telling a story. And then, I expand that outline to a write-up, when I'm ready for it. But with poetry, I usually just find lines rambling in my head and I immediately write them down on napkins, scraps of paper, calendar ends, diaries or whatever else I can lay my hands on. The difficulty with poetry also comes from the fact that I can either write it everyday while the muses are right. And when they go, they abandon me in a way that I lose rhythm for several years altogether. Even attempts to "create" verses don't work at such times. They become so dry and contrived.