Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Ars longa
The other day, one of my patients said, “I bet you’ve already blogged me.” Which surprised me a little because I wasn’t wearing my “I’m blogging this” tee shirt, haven’t mentioned to anyone at work that I blog, and certainly hadn’t mentioned it to him. Turns out he was just ribbing me, but before I realized that I said, “I NEVER blog my patients!”
Yes, yes, this is patently false. Although if you’ve paid attention, you’ll note that I don’t blog my patients in any identifiable way. I would prefer to think their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them in these posts.
Anyway, I started to realize that this blog is all the writing I have anymore. I’m not creating anything, and I miss it. I really do. It’s hard to believe I could have written something like three-quarters of a million words, and now nothing. Like the reservoir has dried up.
I’m not lacking ideas. The ideas are there, but the words are not there. The voice is not there. The drive is not there.
And something inside says that if I could just start, the words and the voice and the drive would come. It’s a bootstrapping operation. I need to re-read some old work, perhaps, or set aside a tiny block of time every day and make it longer and longer, do one or all of those little tricks I’ve read about but just can’t bring myself to do.
It’s an awfully weird state of paralysis. But I can still blog, after a fashion.
D.
Am not a writer, nor do I aspire to be one. But the best advice I’ve ever heard was a variation of BICHOK. It came from Nora Roberts, who said that she had wrote through writer’s block. Because she could fix whatever was wrong on with the words on the page, even if it came out like crap, but she couldn’t fix a blank page. That doesn’t cure the underlying paralysis, though.
Weirdly, or perhaps not: I am at exactly the same place. Exactly, precisely the same place.
For me, I know I could break this block with discipline. I used to write in the morning, which is my most creative time. I’d get up, make coffee, and bang away at something for an hour or 90 minutes until it was time to go to work. When my work schedule changed almost 3 years ago now, I lost my morning time and I haven’t had the discipline to re-establish a writing schedule.
And I feel the lack, as you do. I miss it. But I don’t have the discipline to discipline myself, if that makes sense.
ALSO: my recent blogging sucks much worse than yours.
On the positive side, not writing leaves you more time for reading. Have you read Saturday by Ian McEwan? http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/saturday.html As a physician, you might be inspired to use your real life experiences in a similar way. I’m just sayin’ it might awaken your muse.
Blogging, journaling…all writing. But to produce something that goes somewhere, something that sells, it all boils down to discipline…setting aside specific writing time and then following what jmc said Nora Roberts does.
I was told I could still write novels during the summer while I teach during the other months. Yeah, right. How’s that working out for me? It didn’t.
Thanks, folks. I’m afraid I had to look up BICHOK: butt in chair, hands on keyboard. Yeah, I get it.
Lucie, I’ve been tempted for a long time to write the adult story of the kid in this story of mine. One of those things where I suspect the story is there, waiting to get out, but the muse ain’t sharing. Like I have to pony up my BICHOK and then she’ll show me where to go.
Maybe some day soon.
Did you see this? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-susan-meyers/41-over-40-novelists-debuting_b_706576.html
Thanks for that, Lucie. I was beginning to despair at all the under-48s on the list, but the last several buoyed me up. Perhaps I, too, can be Laura Ingalls Wilder!