Hello DarknessMy Old Friend

Dedicated to Catherine O’Donovan

Sometimes I’m asked how I deal with writer’s block.

Usually I tell the inquirer that I can’t afford to get it; that writer’s block is a luxury for hobbyists, not fledgling wordsmiths racing neck-and-neck with the poverty line.

But here’s my confession; I say that mostly because I think it sounds cool, not because it’s 100 per cent honest. It’s certainly true that I can’t afford to give up and take a nap, but writer’s block does strike occasionally. In fact, I cured my last bout about 10 minutes ago.

I think the root cause of such mental constipation is the realization that I don’t know what to write about followed by a feeling of heavy panic. Panic prompts block, which prompts more panic, which prompts more block.

When I’m in the middle of an episode it’s not a pretty sight; I get up, I sit down, I mutter to myself, I pull my hair, I look in the fridge, I cruise YouTube, I pace back and forth with an unfriendly expression on my face. When it gets really bad I just start staring at different objects in my environment while my inner dialogue plays:

“Clocks. What do you know about clocks? Not much. Can you make clocks interesting. Probably not. Okay, toasters. What do you know about toasters? Even less than clocks. You burned yourself on a toaster once, can you write about that? No. That would just be stupid. You’re stupid. Your sock has a hole in it. You should have taken business in college.”

A few months ago I wrote an essay about a cobra and a mongoose that was a direct result of the above-mentioned method. As if by magic, as the deadline approaches something always twigs. I don’t know how the psychological mechanisms work, but luckily they always seem to for me — just in the nick of time.

However, once writer’s block has been conquered the scribe must be careful not to acquire the opposite affliction; literary diarrhea.

Literary diarrhea is characterized by an author’s tendency to natter on, to beleaguer the point, to be long on wind, to give too many examples, to pontificate uselessly, to say the same thing over and over again in slightly different words, to be seemingly clueless about the reader’s desire to finish the article, to retread old territory, to linger over a small detail that isn’t really the main thrust of the story anyway and to just not shut up when he should.

Not wanting to be accused of such a crime-of-letters I hereby pledge that this sentence (the one I’m writing right now) will be the last one in this piece.
So there.