Does the act of writing fill you with anxiety or dread? Do you get goose bumps, feel cold and clammy, or sweat profusely? There are others like you who yearn to write, but it puts them in a state of great anxiety. I think I know why. You have high expectations out of what you write. You believe it’s not worth doing if it isn’t publishable prose or poetry coming right out of the gate. Many writers, successful authors, have told me their first draft is trash. Garbage. Tripe. But they write it anyway. They write it because just as I do, they have the urge, the compulsion to write, to put words on paper or the screen. They write in a fury just to get the story idea down in words so they can look at it, so they can work with it.
If you are a regular reader of this blog you know about the story I told about the CSI episode about a man who murdered his much abused wife. She had the compulsion to write. Grissom called the compulsion hypergraphia. In that dreary little house with an overbearing stultifying husband she found her joy in self-expression. When she ran out of paper, and knowing her miserly husband would not spend the money to buy her more paper, she started to write on the walls. Perhaps this was his motive for murder, t don’t know, but she kept on writing, And Grissom’s team found what she had written, and used it to get the prosecutor to convict him.
I don’t think you have the problem of having nowhere and nothing to write on. You probably have the wherewithal to obtain paper,and or you have a computer with a sufficient hard drive to store what you write. But you’re scared to write. Know what I think it is? It’s a false belief that everything you write is written as the ancient Egyptians wrote, carved in stone for the ages to critique and comment on. Not so. Hardly anyone carves in stone anymore. Those people are monument makers for cemeteries or historical places. Our words are much more ephemeral. If I don’t like what I’m writing right now, I am free to press the delete key. I probably won’t, because I’m egotistical enough to believe that these words are pretty good, and that you will like them too. If you don’t like what you’re writing, you are as free as I to press the delete key or to pull your page out of the typewriter, crumple it up and try to emulate Michael Jordan. Or if scribbling by hand, crumple it up and try your free throw.
What’s my secret? What am I doing right now? I am typing whatever comes to me. When I am working on a story, I think about the scene playing out in my head, and either dictate it (I use a Dragon) or type it, or if I am doing a word sprint or writing whilst watching the boob tube, scribbling it down by hand with my handy pen on my clipboard with a bunch of pages of notebook paper on it. I scribble whatever is in my head. If I fear writer’s block, I dig out my ugly notebook and warm up, again scribbling whatever is in my head. The ugly notebook idea came from a book titled Outwitting Writer’s Block, by Jenna Glatzer. Having scribbled whatever is in your head you have a choice; you can use it or discard it. Or maybe store it away for your next project. There will be a next project. There nearly always is.
See you next week for another exciting look at the writer's universe..
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