Suffering a bit from it, I think. I haven’t been able to do anything for a couple of weeks now. If I’ve taken a break, it’s usually a bit trickier for me to get back into again, but it’s never taken this long before. I sit down and want nothing to do with writing. I still get ideas and scribble them down and have written a couple of scenes, but nothing really productive.
So I decided to fall back on my next best skill-set–research.
This is the definition from Wikipedia: (Don’t even get me started on what I think of Wikipedia, but it’ll do for now.)
Writer’s block is a condition, associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task in hand. At the other extreme, some “blocked” writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.
If that doesn’t depress you… The entry goes on to describe the pressure of genius and how creativity could come from a particular portion of the brain and how writer’s block could be because of damage to that portion. From trauma or just from drinking too much? What if I’m just bored? Lazy? Tired?
The Purdue Online Writer’s Lab has an article about Symptoms and Cures for Writer’s Block. However, it’s for students working on assignments and papers. No help there.
Then there’s the Writer’s Block site. My first impression was not a good one. The bad music and little movie at the beginning didn’t impress me. I’m not particularly fond of websites that start playing music as soon as you link to their site (See? I’m giving you a warning. Nice of me, eh?) Worse–I don’t like it when they’ve played their movie and music and then you have to click to enter the site. Frustrating. That’s why I went to the site in the first place–because I wanted to enter it! Why should I have to click again? Hm. I call myself low-maintenance…perhaps I’m mistaken.
Once you’ve accessed the site (again), it’s not that attractive. Black and blue–like a big bruise. Seems to mostly be for musicians anyway, although there are links to forums for writers and poets and even visual artists as well. And there’s a never-ending story started, although I didn’t want to register just to find out what that was all about.
The best seems to be Language is a Virus. Much more interesting site (although way too many ads) and there were even creative writing games like the Haiku-a-Tron and Poetry Generator. Unfortunately, their website design for the games puts black words on a black background, so you have to highlight to read the results, and I only discovered that by accident. (So much for being impressed by the design.) But the content is still good. Writing exercises from Burroughs and Kerouac and Dali and even a link to NaNoWriMo and photos for visual inspiration… Oh my, yes. It’s my new favorite. Definitely check it out. I don’t seem to be writing more because of it, but at least I have a legitimate excuse to be wasting time now.