Writer's Block

I am not feeling creative today. The muse is not merely elusive, she's checked out and gone to Tahiti. (Stupid muse. She never takes ME to Tahiti.)

Of course, there are some people who say you shouldn't rely on muses, because they are terribly fickle. Writing is work, they say, and you just have to treat it like any other job, which means you do it even when you don't feel like it. Sit down at a certain time every day, crack your knuckles, and go for it. Stare at that blank page til you go blind, and then write your name over and over again. Eventually, the experts assure me, you will get bored of that and start rearranging the letters of your name to form other words, and then you will start making up new words out of friends' names, and suddenly a story will start flowing out of you, and angels will start singing as heavenly light falls around youand you will think, "Wow, where did all THIS come from?? I'm sure glad I sat down and did my work of staring at the blank page for awhile! I'm sure glad I didn't give up!"

Me, I usually give up. Five minutes of writer's block is about all I can take. After that I start looking around and noticing how dirty my room is, for example. This never seems to catch my attention until I sit down to write. Or I will go play the piano. Or the guitar. (I don't actually know how to play the guitar all that well, but I'll strum through the good ol' G-C-D-Em chords until my fingers fall off rather than continue facing that horrible white wasteland, The Blank Page.)

In short, I often find myself doing ANYTHING to avoid writing, which is troubling to me since I tell everyone that I am a writer. How can you be a writer and NOT write? It's a mystery.

So today, I leave you with this meditation: if a writer is walking through a forest, and there are trees around, does she exist? And if a tree falls on her, will she tell a story about it?