writer's block

When I take time off from writing—and sometimes for no apparent reason—I get into a strange funk where I can’t write anything decent, and I begin to suspect that I’m really a complete fraud, that I have no business calling myself a writer, and that nothing beautiful will ever come from me. I used to get really nervous during these times, all out of sorts, and feel sorry for myself and for all the time I have wasted scribbling mediocre words onto the page.

But more and more, I am learning how to push through those funks and to keep writing. To not be so hard on myself and to know that eventually I will write something worthwhile again.

I know it is a wonderful thing to surround oneself with beautiful writing, but some writers are just so good that they make you feel like absolute crap about yourself. The current glorious thorn in my side is Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River, which I have read countless times. It still completely bowls me over when I spend time with the book. Enger’s fiction is like poetry, do you know what I mean by that? His novel reads like song lyrics; his words lope with grace.

My words fumble in the dark. They bump into one another. They sit in awkward silence, then open their mouths for mundane commentary.

At times like this, I have to trust the creative process—that I will write something decent again, probably within the next two weeks, that I will fill a page then wring it out to excise the fat, that I will freewrite and stumble into something relatively brilliant and ready for me to own, that I will tie together bits and pieces of imagery to make a word necklace, and that my writing group will not allow me to settle with mediocrity. It is good for a writer to have critical friends.

So, I continue to write, to push through the fog, knowing that the garbage I record is just priming the pump for later excellence. One day, maybe a week from now, my fingers will fly, inspired, over the keyboard, and I will think of how I felt tonight and realize that it was really so silly. And besides—what else would I do?

I can’t not write.