inspiration

Do I suffer from writer’s block?

by 2clouds

I am legitimately asking myself this question. I’ve not done any creative writing since the outbreak of the pandemic. Not the kind I want to do anyway.

No ideas. No drive.

There seems to be a distinct lack of will or desire to sit down and wrack my brain for words that might conceivably end up becoming a story. Indeed, whilst I have had plenty of ideas in the past, nothing has excited me for a long time.

The pandemic, the lockdowns, isolation, the money worries – they all played their part, of course. None of it helped to motivate me to write creatively.

Yet, I still write. I try to post here (though we have seen that lately, I have not been as consistent as I wanted to be), and I also journal (also not exactly frequently).

Plus, there is my freelance writing, which helps pay the bills.

Maybe I am suffering from a creative block?

I know it isn’t so much the work of sitting down and putting words on paper. The problem is a lack of ideas. Or more specifically that nothing I come up with truly excites me.

I always jot down ideas. And never pursue them.

It’s not a lack of wanting to write, though. When I read Neil Gaiman, I want to write. Same for other writers I truly enjoy. They make me want to write. But what do I write when nothing comes to mind?

Putting one word after another isn’t going to cut it if they don’t make a coherent whole.

Let me digress for a moment. Lately, I have spent hours watching YouTube videos, but it turns out that I haven’t been doing so just randomly. I have been seeking inspiration and solutions. I watch the content I enjoy. And I have realized that seeking out creators whose content I enjoy is a manner of seeking out what seems to work. I want to figure out why it works.

Why do these creators appeal to me? What is it about their content that speaks to me? If I gave you a playlist of everyone whose content I watched lately, you’d find a surprisingly common theme in style, manner, and topics.

So, today I sat and pondered what everyone whose content I’ve been enjoying lately has in common and why they appeal to me. It is quite striking when you become aware of it.

Whilst it hasn’t quite cured my creative block, I am at least here now to post this. And it has got me thinking about my blog as well.

But more on that tomorrow. I still need to do more thinking.

The Empty Page

by 2clouds

Where do you begin when you have a million thoughts running through your mind, dozens of ideas, no thread to follow? There are so many things I want to write about. But I have to start somewhere.

So, I am starting here. With the challenge itself. To begin writing.

The empty page can be daunting. What to do with it? Which word to put first? Which ones should follow? Will I make a fool of myself when I put this ‘out there’?

But everything that stops us is merely in our heads. As is so often the case, we’re our own worst enemies. Nobody can stop us. Nobody ever truly has the power to stop us. Unless, we give it to them. But that’s on us.

The only one stopping us is us. The empty page just sits there. That it is waiting for us to put words down is merely our projection. We are waiting to put words down. We usually just don’t know where to begin.

Never mind that, though. Just get started. I am committed to this new project, which means I have to regularly post new content. Or, at least, re-post content I’ve written before.

That is a lot of work. I mean a lot. And that, too, is a daunting prospect.

But I am also looking forward to all of it and I am no longer afraid of the empty page. There will always be words ready to flow. Whether they are the ones I wanted to put down or not doesn’t even matter. Anything I write is good (not qualitatively speaking, mind you, but for the mere fact of having written anything at all).

Writing is good. It’s life. My life anyway.

As is riding. My motorbike. But more on that elsewhere 😉