Category: Writing

Writer’s Block

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Great.  Five days into 2012 and I’m sick.  And not just suffer through it sick, but go home from work and take the longest nap of my life sick.  Okay so maybe it wasn’t the longest nap of my life, but you get where I’m going with this, right?  Basically my head feels like it’s about to explode, my throat is swelling shut and exercising my creative side seems almost as hard as running a marathon.  On the flip side, I promised myself I would write creatively once a day in 2012 so instead of working on my novel or screenplay (that makes way too much sense and procrastination is my secret key to success) I’m trying my hand at discussing writer’s block.

No matter what way you look at it, writer’s block absolutely blows.  For me, it manifests in a strangely physical way.  My fingers start to hurt.  I sit in front of my blank computer screen, wanting nothing more than to start typing, but when no words start to flow, my fingers physically begin to ache.  Not cool.  Eventually my head begins to hurt and I start thinking that if I don’t clean my closet out in this exact moment, I might actually explode (see – procrastination rears its ugly head again).  I will say this – my apartment is never cleaner than on the days I have intense writer’s block.

Even this randomly rambling post is an attempt to feel just a tad bit better about the fact that I’ve been completely stuck on the same paragraph in a chapter of my novel for the past three days.  Chores are helpful, but I find that writing is the best way to overcome writer’s block.  Even if the writing is just a little sub-par (editing, re-editing and editing again later is a girl’s best friend).

We all know the adage – getting started is often the most difficult part.  So for those of you who may be interested in pushing yourself just a little harder or want to hurl yourself over the mountain of nerves staring you down and making you feel like you can’t put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard?) to start the writing process, I have put together a short list of guides who have helped me over the years:

Imitation is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery:

Sometimes finding that jumping off point can be awful.  If your mind is as blank as your computer screen, where do you pull the inspiration for a new piece?  I’ve found that trying to imitate another author’s style can be helpful.  It will also help you decide what you do and don’t like about your own writing.  Is this author’s style similar to your own or completely opposite?  If it’s similar – great!  Be inspired and write away!  If it’s dissimilar, push yourself to try to write something in that style anyway.  What can it hurt?  By the end of the exercise you’ll either have something totally unique and completely outside of your comfort zone or a new view on your own style of writing.  I suggest starting small.  Work with short fiction or poetry that can be confined to a page – two pages at the absolute max!  Read another author’s work and then play with the style, the themes, the characters.  How would you have written the piece?  Can you imagine continuing the story using the same characters?  Can you write on a completely different subject using the same style or rhyme scheme. Try some of the following for help –

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton UP, 1993.

Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories.  W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.

You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories.  Oologan, 2007.

Exercise Prompts:

Self-explanatory, right?  If you’re looking for a good book of exercises to start with – check out:

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction.  Writer’s Digest Books, 2005.

Read:

The most obvious, but I think it can never be said enough.  Looking for inspiration?  Read as much as you possibly can!  When I come across a phrase or sentence that moves me it absolutely motivates me to write on my own.  I can’t stress enough the importance of reading as much as you possibly can to help influence and drive you in your own writing endeavors.

So here I am – one post further into my goal for 2012 and no closer to moving past that paragraph of my novel that’s been haunting me for days.  Alas, I do not fret, my friends.  Another 2012 goal is to finish the novel by the end of the year and as great as I am with procrastinating, I’m even better under a solid deadline.

The Hanged Man

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He hated dropping his son off at kindergarten each morning because he couldn’t stand the hushed whispers from the gaggle of parents huddled around their mocha lattes outside of Room 5.  What a shame, one of the flock might say, he looks devastated.  These kinds of things just don’t happen around here.  It could have been any of us.  Are you kidding, another would say, it’s just too bad they haven’t taken that child away from him.  It’s obvious what he did to her.

It had been one hundred seventy-four days since they last saw her, bundled up in her snow coat and scarf, crouched down to kiss her son on the forehead before he entered the classroom.  As much as he hated the gaggle, he envied them too because they got to say hello and then goodbye.  They got to smile in her direction.  They got to look at her one last time.  For him it was just a call me when you’re ready to talk, a door slammed harder than necessary and then a phone call six hours later that their son was still at school waiting to be picked up.  It all happened so fast, there just wasn’t any time.

There were cameras for a while with desperate pleas and morning show anchors and church ladies with their Lord Jesus please bring her home safe.  There were so many cameras at one point that he had to send his son to stay with his grandmother because the reporters were saying things no child should ever have to hear.  Where’s her body, they would shout from the curb outside his house, why aren’t you cooperating with the police?  But they didn’t know that he cried himself to sleep at night, partly because he didn’t have any information that would be helpful to the police, but mostly because the last thing he said to her was call me when you’re serious before he slammed the door and never saw her again.  They didn’t know that his son could only fall asleep if he was gripping a small picture of his mother to his chest so hard that the frame left indentation marks on his forearms.  The cameras and the grip marks went away, but the regret never would.

When he couldn’t take another minute of feeling helpless to help her, he found himself in a dark room with an old wrinkled woman who smelled of cat vomit and Chanel No. 5, between them a card on the table showing a picture of a man suspended upside down from a tree, one leg bent across the other.  The Hanged Man, the old woman said and he leaned in, because her voice was just above a whisper.  She tapped a heavy finger on the card – clarity, suspension of worlds, sacrifice, she said and she tapped it again.  He felt stupid.  He never believed in that stuff before, never gave it a second thought until he remembered that she had seen a tarot card reader once.  The fortuneteller had predicted the birth of their son, right down to the day – almost down to the minute.  He told the old woman in the dark room that he didn’t understand and she asked him what he wanted of her.  I want to find her, he said, I want to be with her again.  My son deserves that chance.

She eyed him up and down before extending her hand and motioning for his.  Her skin was cold and dry and he was surprised at how comforting that was.  She traced the lines in his palm with her forefinger without a saying a word.  So you want to see her again, she asked, her hand hovering for just a moment over the scar that extended all the way across the base of his thumb, a scar that reminded him of her and that argument they had in Joshua Tree.  He nodded.  She forced his hand closed into a fist, pressed tight in between her own.  But you are too young to die, she said, and your son is but a child.

Breakfast

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He never made me bacon because I complained too much when he did.  It smelled like Wyoming and tasted like pity sex.  I hated it, and he knew it, but for some reason that morning he pulled a pan out from the cabinet next to the sink and started sizzling the stuff right there in front of me.  I stood close to him, in silence, and stared into the pan, watching the fat pull away from the meat.  I felt him looking at me, felt his lips land on my cheek in a sloppy, wet kiss.  I had to leave the kitchen, it was nauseating.

I maneuvered over the sweaty t-shirt and running shoes he’d discarded on the dining room floor after his early morning jog and onto the couch where I buried my face in a giant stuffed teddy bear my mother had made from my grandmother’s ancient mink coat.  It was real mink from the early 30’s and it smelled like cigarettes and Christmas and I liked it better than the smell wafting from my kitchen.  His bacon always angered me.  It lingered in my apartment for days, seeping its way into my couch cushions and my carpet before attaching itself to my hair and then my skin.  Just seeing it made my fingers feel greasy.  I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand in an attempt to dab away what felt like an increase in excess oil on my face.  Nothing helped.

That morning he was humming and hovering over the stove and I should have loved him for it, I wanted to love him.  I tried a little harder everyday to love him that much more, but nothing seemed to help.  I couldn’t love him because he didn’t have to remember and I did and it made my bones ache.  He didn’t remember the argument I had with another man six hours before I met him.  He didn’t remember the words I used to rip apart that man’s world.  Stupid words that meant something to me then, but I can’t remember them now.  He didn’t remember how I smiled at the bar when I noticed him, noticing me.  He didn’t see the pain in the creased skin of my forehead, or if he did, he hid it well as he touched the small of my back and asked me if we had met before, maybe at the Coffee Bean on Wilshire?

I had never met him before but I slept with him anyway.  When we were done, I rolled over to the opposite side of the bed and cried in the dark because what else do you do after you’ve made the choice to ruin your life?  I didn’t mean to stay, but I fell asleep and in the morning I woke up to what was probably supposed to be a cheerful whistle coming from the kitchen but it sounded more like the heartache of a ship leaving port to me.  Before I could squirm out of bed and into my clothes from the night before, he greeted me with a large breakfast and a rose he stole from his neighbor’s front yard.  It was his attempt at sincerity.  He apologized that he didn’t have any toast but insisted I try his “award-winning” bacon scramble.  I vomited vodka tonics for two days and in a brief moment of self pity I gained the courage to try and mend the world I was so callous about ripping apart, but apologies aren’t strong enough to thread a needle with and you can never return to the same place once you’ve defiled it.  He didn’t have to remember any of that, but I did.

With my face still buried in the mink it took me a minute to realize his hand was weaving it’s way through my tangled hair.  I sat up and looked at him.  I was about to tell him that I didn’t love him when he motioned me to be quiet, handed me a napkin and placed a large plate of bacon on the coffee table in front of me.

Grocery List

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This cute guy with sandy blonde hair and face stubble is about to hit on me in line at the supermarket.  I can tell because he smiles and tries to catch my eye every time I turn around to pull another wet wipe from my purse, which is slumped over the child seat of the grocery cart between us.  The child that should be occupying the child seat is instead clinging to my side; clawing at my neck because I took away the pack of Trident he lifted from the display where they keep the candy meant to torment the impulse shoppers.  He’s three and doesn’t want to chew it, he just likes playing with shinny things, but he’s accidentally “stolen” before so I’d rather not risk it.

I steal a quick look back and he’s still staring.  We make eye contact and he fumbles before he comments on how long the lines are.  If his intention is to flirt with me, then this attempt fails.  It’s so bad I almost turn back around, but it’s eight o’clock on a Friday night and my husband won’t be home until eleven and even when he arrives it won’t be anything more than a grunt and a scotch before he passes out to a Letterman lullaby.  So I’m spending my evening trying to buy lettuce and gluten free, Envirokids cereal and sitting in a stalled line at the supermarket because the eighty-year-old woman two carts in front of me is paying with money she must have fished out from underneath couch cushions.  Instead of turning my back I take the compliment offered by his smile.  I tell him that I lived in L.A. for four years and I never sat in traffic like this.

He says I have the most beautiful eyes before lowering his, admitting his embarrassment for hitting on me at the checkout stand.  At least it wasn’t the frozen food section, because that would be embarrassing.  I tell terrible jokes when I’m nervous.  He laughs.  His jaw is strong and square and he’s built like a fireman or someone who has to do heavy lifting.  He looks like everything I thought I wanted, everything I told myself didn’t exist, before I settled on my husband.  He leans over the handle of his cart aiming for a better look at the contents of mine.  His blonde hair is just long enough to fall over his eyes and I’m disappointed that they’re not focused on me for the first time since I entered the line.  By now, the old woman ahead of me has finished counting out her $87.64 total in single bills, nickels and pennies and the line inches forward to the man clutching a stack of PennySaver coupons.  When I turn back around, the cute guy’s eyes are back on me.  He says his ex-wife was gluten free so he knows a lot of great recipes and maybe, if I’m interested, we can swap sometime.