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Writer’s Block
To people who have never felt a creative spark tingle through their neurons, it’s just a fantasy, a fabrication imagined by writers -- who are lazy in the first place when they are writing and therefore must make up excuses for the extra lazy periods of not writing. But, ask any writer -- whose fingers itch to hold her trusty pen or feel the soft tension of pressing down keys, whose mind is filled with imaginary friends who are so much more interesting than the real ones -- and she will tell you, it’s reality, as harsh and barren as any other empty reality.
It’s not that she doesn’t have ideas. People and their situations zoom around her mind, live in her dreams. Lovers meet, break up, and die. An unbeliever finds his way. Animals have voices. True love is real. But sitting with that crisp blue-lined paper, green tipped pen hovering millimeters from contact, the words don’t form -- pen and paper can’t connect. Despite those characters pounding the walls of her brain, screaming for freedom, nothing comes out. Whatever passage allows those imaginings to transform into words is blocked, like a bridge missing its center. The only ink it allows to spill onto the page is the ink for those looping doodles that clutter the edges of the page.
This current block is unlike any other. Usually it’s just a temporary setback -- a scene not going as planned, a little too much stress from the outside world -- speedbumps in the road of her writing journey. This time it’s not just a bump, it’s a boulder. She hasn’t written a decent word in weeks. The few sentences she has managed to drain from her halting pen have sounded like something from a bad junior high newspaper -- uninteresting adjectives, motionless verbs, flat images -- nothing alive.
The only thing living at the moment is her writer’s block. It’s like a vine twining its way around her heart or whatever part of her contains her inspiration. The stalks and leaves weave together into bars, tightly knit and unbreakable, trapping the words that used to flow so freely. They become tangled in its web, letters disintegrating into piles of uselessness, unable to rejoin into meaningful words. As she grasps her pen, straining her mind to recapture the words, her knuckles clench, skin tightening until it hurts, as if holding her pen tightly will make the words flow more easily. None of her usual remedies help -- not the bubble bath while burning a lavender candle, not the walk around the block in her lime green polar fleece, not the homemade tape mix of all her favorite music from Beethoven to Bon Jovi. Nothing.
Maybe this time her Muse has left her for good -- gave her a few good years of writing and then just up and left. But, she doesn’t want to believe that. Her Muse has been good to her, and she does believe in that mythical god, despite what other people tell her. Sometimes things just have to be real, no matter what. Her Muse won’t let her down.
In one of her writing books, she once read that while writing a person should always keep her hand moving, so she decides to try -- just start writing about the crack in her wall, maybe find a monster or fairy world hidden inside. Start off with the simplest thing, the simplest words, and see what happens. At this point, anything is better than nothing.
Her left hand gouges the pen into the paper, pressing the tip down hard to prevent it from becoming separate from the paper. The ink flows out in thick lines, with blotches where the point lingers an extra second. The strength of her pen tears the paper, leaving small holes where the tip poked through, dragging across the paper with her continued strokes. As the writing turns frenzied, her joints cramp, but she keeps going, filling pages with small green words from edge to edge, leaving no margin on any side.
The stories that ran around trapped in her head begin to unfold on the pages of looseleaf. The people that tormented her dreams finally live independently, no longer depend on her for their life or condemn her for holding them captive in her thoughts, and now exist without plaguing her. The scenes, finally free of the confines of her mind, spread across the pages, painting their colors and sensations within the deep green strokes.
The day her block breaks, the two hours she sets aside for writing each day expand. She can’t stop moving her hand. The sun finishes rising. Noon passes, without hunger stopping her, and her hand keeps moving without pause. As the sun begins its descent to the west, the finger and wrist cramps become unbearable, so she halts the pen’s movement and loosens the grasp.
When she flexes her fingers, they snap back to the grasping position and her skin folds around the green barrel, slowly stretching around the plastic. She watches her skin move, intrigued by its slow creeping, and then touches the pen back to the paper. But her fingers still feel cramped. She just can’t keep writing anymore.
She stands to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator. As she walks, she feels her skin creep farther around the plastic barrel, like slugs oozing against the webbing of her hand. Her fingernails grow and sharpen as they mold to the point of the pen, while the green ink seeps into her bloodstream. She watches the green line trace through the veins on her wrist and the back of her hand, course up her arm. Tingling overtakes her arm from her fingertips to her elbow, like the millions of needles that poke after sleeping on the arm the whole night. But, like the needles, under the initial pain, she feels relief -- knowing that the blood is flowing back into that part of the body, and that after the few seconds of pain the body will feel rejuvenated.
She can’t move the fingers on her left hand anymore, and the tingling continues until she sits back at her desk and touches the pen to paper. Writing again, her hand moves naturally, comfortably, the cramps now disappeared. The words drip out of the pen, smooth and even, still jamming the pages with small green letters, but with less ferocity. Her left hand, the stretched skin now covered with a green web, burns gently as it glides across the cool smoothness of the white paper.
© 2000 Ann Lesley Hamvas
