Blogger’s Block

Have you ever tried to find inspiration for your writing only to have no effing clue what to write about?  It’s like that episode of Sex and the City where Carrie’s writer’s block in between relationships is so bad that she writes an entire column comparing her search for the perfect man to looking for a French fry and was about to write another one comparing men to socks.  Mine right now is pretty bad.  It’s bad enough that there isn’t enough random stuff going on right now to qualify for a “Randomly…” post.  I wrote a post over the weekend that will be posted next month to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a tragedy that hit me and many Floridians pretty hard in our hearts.  Otherwise, I haven’t had much go on.

So I guess the topic of this post is about the lack of a topic.  Or more precisely, how we manage to write ourselves out of it.

Where do we find inspiration anyway?  I often find that inspiration for my various writings, projects, and ideas often come when I’m not looking for it.  I’m not the kind of person who can force themselves to write.  I can’t force myself to write a poem, because if I wrote a poem for the sake of writing a poem, I would find the quality of it to be…crap.  Complete and utter crap.  I find my best writing comes from my heart.  My best ideas don’t come from mentally taking magnetic letters and throwing them at a board to see what sticks.  That afghan I’ve been working on since March?  I started it when I found some old scrap yarn that I had rolled up into a Frankenball of yarn and decided to see if I could start an afghan from that yarn.  I liked the color scheme so much that I decided to continue on with it.

I find the creative process goes along a little more easily for me when I don’t pressure myself to write…even when it comes to this post.  Yes, it does come across in a style of stream of consciousness, but I can immediately tell that its quality is much less static and sanitized, which is what I sound like when I force myself to write.  It reminds me of all those essays for various English classes that I had to write, and all I can think of after having read them over, many years later, was, “Man, those sucked.”  (At least they sucked from an average, everyday reader’s standpoint.  From an academic standpoint, most of them were perfectly acceptable.).  My writing back then was very robotic and formulaic.  I’ve only ever taken one creative writing class (my freshman year of high school, and even then I don’t remember much of it), and I don’t think I remember a single thing I learned in that class.  I’ve learned more about my writing style over the years from just writing, be it in my journals or my notebook where I write my poems.  An individual’s own writing style cannot be taught in school, he or she has to discover it for themselves, through experience, both in life and in the very act of writing.

How’s that for trying to work through blogger’s block?  Sometimes I have to write by the seat of my pants, but in the end, I think this was a pretty nice result for an effort of experimental, impulsive writing.