Writer's block?
I’m probably not the first and I probably won’t be the last. What does one write about when they have writer’s block? How about writer’s block!?
I haven’t been to see any films after Hellboy II:The Golden Army and I haven’t been to any gigs recently (although this will change on Saturday night…wait for the update!). I checked digg.com, and probably the most interesting article was about the new Google browser called Google Chrome which is being released tomorrow. Should be interesting!
Today was a long day for various reasons, so my brain was not concentrating as it should. I tried to come up with a few topics, but none of them stuck. I lost all interest after writing the first couple of sentences and that’s when I realised I have a mild case of writer’s block (I won’t be writing The Shining inspired “All work and no play makes Andrew a dull boy” over and over again just yet).
I spoke of Trent Reznor in a previous post and how he is trying to interact with his fans by creating a film festival. Reznor suffered a serious case of writer’s block at one point in his career when he was not sure which direction he wanted to take his music following his second album, The Downward Spiral.
I googled writer’s block for some inspiration. What I wanted were some quotes about the phenomenon and about.com looked like a good place to start. About.com is an interesting website because it seems to have instructions on just about anything and everything. This particular page provided some ideas for overcoming this annoying state of affairs. It also claims that the scariest thing for Ernest Hemmingway was “A blank sheet of paper.”
I also found a blog called “How to write for the web” which had a collection of quotes that were also encouraging. My favourites were:
“The hardest part is getting to the top of page 1.” – Tom Stoppard
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
“I believe in the scissors more than I do in the pencil.” – Truman Capote
So it appears that writing about writer’s block is a good way to overcome writer’s block. I can only write on this topic once, but out of this exercise I have produced some ideas that I will most certainly write about in the future.
