Howdy,
I’d like to think that I don’t suffer from writer’s block too often, but at the start of this session, the start of this sentence, I stared for an awkward pause of beats at that blinking cursor …
Top, left corner.
Blink.
Blink. Blink. Blink.
If you stare and then let it get to you, in the pausing, it grows. blink. Blink. BLINK.
BLINK, BLINK, BLINK!
That’s why I just jumped in and went for it!
Besides, I felt it a little unfair that the blinking cursor was “waiting” so impatiently. It was rude of it, since immediately before I had completed about “a post’s worth” of words (~550) in a free write session. It wasn’t that I had come to the computer without anything to say or without being able to find words.
It’s more that I had just used them, and was taking a beat to shift gears, switch topics …
But how quickly panic can creep in. Creep in (~burst upon the scene, a detonation with shocking, bombastic mocking). That’s the crazy part, the reason writer’s fear writer’s block so much, so irrationally.
But I’d come to the blinking computer writing. You see, starting with the free write usually gives me excellent advantages. One, sneaking in extra, easy-flow words toward that 200K count of mine, and, two, thought and phrase generation — brainstorming with a chance to quickly rough draft to work out kinks: possibly discover an item more rare and worth brushing off to polish off.
I haven’t yet committed any egregious, barefaced theft, in patently copying over creative content from my “FREE WRITES” file to a blog post for double credit against my word count debt taskmaster. I’m not employing the process “rough draft” in the FREE WRITES and then tweaking a “final draft” for posting on the blog. I’m not working under the “final draft” pressure on my blog right now, so why put that on myself.
I’m simply searching for words, a kernel of an idea, or, if extra fruitful, a phrase to bring straight over or flip around to make ready for release. I’m writing more like two layers when I free write first. Sometimes they connect, sometimes — like today — they don’t. (Yet even then, in another way, it did.)
Blink, and go.
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
Word Count: 108,017 / On Pace: 106,150 / Year’s Goal: 200,000
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