Blocked

The never-fun experience of not knowing what to say is happening. Some call it Writer's Block. I call it an ass. It's not so much that I can't find the words to say something, or that I have nothing to say, but that I don't really know what I want say.

So I'm talking about writer's block instead. I remember way back when, I used to suffer from terrible writer's block. I would think that I could never write another word again, nothing worth reading, nothing that would make sense, nothing. It would infuriate me, antagonise me, sicken me, and then later I would write something and forget all about it.

I've Googled how to get rid of it, written down lists of how to get rid of it, put into practice so many different things just to get rid of it. It's the common cold of the writing world, and it's a damned plague.

Except...

Well, it's all in our heads, isn't it? I mean, really, we're just stuck for words, and then saying it's writer's block. There's something wrong with that, though. By naming it, we're giving it power, over us, over our words, our language. That's bad. That's really bad. The name makes it strong, makes it difficult to get rid of.

A friend of mine gave me a writer's block birthday card once, and I actually use it to get rid of the damn block on words. It's literally a picture of a cinder block. What sort of power does a cinder block have over words? None. None at all. It's perfect.

Tonight, I don't know what I want to say here. I've been saying things to people on Facebook, so it's not that I have nothing to talk about, but it's all private stuff. I have college work to do, and I know what to say there, but I don't especially want to talk about literary criticism or how it's affected by views and opinions of Walt Whitman over the space of three months or so, not here.

It doesn't help that I'm tired. Certainly not. Thinking of what I'd like to say in the public sphere gets difficult the more tired I become. It's why some blog posts go off on weird tangents and express convoluted metaphors that don't really hold up. It's the public-sphere part of trying to write a blog post that makes it difficult to decide what to say. There's a lot I want to talk about that I can't (aforementioned future plans that depend on how my time-line will hold up before I know exactly when certain things will happen), and a lot that's just not interesting enough to share here.

Effectively, I have to force myself to say something every day, for the sake of writing every day, and that's the difficult part. Being creative on command is the difficult part. It's possible, though. I mean, I did it for a week with Balor Reborn. People who do NaNoWriMo have to do it every day. I know how to help kick-start the creativity. That still won't give me an idea as to what I can say that I want to say publicly.

With that in mind, today, I settled on just making it clear that I have to force this a lot. But look, a whole post out of that. It's not just a "What" that I have to write about, but the "Why". The "Why" is what makes the post so long, and what makes it worth reading (or, at least worth writing).

Tomorrow, I'll probably give out about assignments. Sure, it would be rude not to.