Shooting at Bubbles

Everyone who writes for a living, regardless of whether it be books, or print, or blogging, will at some point complain about suffering from writer’s block. This term of horror; because that is how we all look upon its happening as, means that no matter how hard we try we just can’t seem to get anything down on paper. We try but in the end all we see is the blank expanse of whitespace and nothing to fill it with.

Equally unnerving though is the internal pressure that can build when there is just too much going on in one’s head that you can’t get it all straight enough to form a single sentence that even comes close to making sense. You know that you’ve got at least one, if not more, really good idea for a story but it is all a jumbled mess that has no beginning and no ending and screw even trying to find the middle.

I don’t even think you can blame it on something like information overload because that is really something that is relatively easy to deal with. No, this is beyond information overload I think as it is more of knowing that you could do something really interesting in sharing what your thoughts are about the information; or even just blurting it out in snappy paragraphs with a cutesy picture or something – and yet you look at all the individual pieces that go together and nothing makes sense other than that welling up feeling of frustration.

Sure you can try walking away from that stream of words but even as you try to escape by watching some television or blowing something up in a game there is a part of your mind that is still trying to string words together. Words that might give you that starting point you desperately want but in the end you only find yourself staring at the darken ceiling listening as the clock ticks by the minutes.

So you get back up and start the coffeemaker back up hoping to face down those demons by once more going through the jigsaw puzzle pieces of posts that you have flagged because they all hold a germ of an idea. As your Twitter stream flows by and the caffeine sweeps into your bloodstream you start to get a grasp on the words you want. Success is only a paragraph away – the demons of of your internal verbal nightmare are slowly returning to their lair.

And you want to be a writer eh .. have at it my friend … it isn’t all fun and games.