...although not much.
Writer's Block
And old declassified content.
On Heroism
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Penny
also, Eppy, Dub, you still need to upgrade to a fancy new Gmail powered blogger account.
UNLESS YOU WANT TO BACK OUT LIKE A SISSY!!!
Writer's block sucks. Literally. It doesn't matter how ingenious a train of thought might be, or how smooth the ride has been previously. When you slam into that wall of anti-thought, your momentum dives to zero, leaving a vacuous space within your brain cavity. Hours can go by while you try to get things going again. If you're easily entertained/distracted like I am, you measure your time in weeks or months. And sometimes, you measure it in the number of classes you skip/fail.
Part of the problem comes from a premature sense of finality or closure. You reach a certain point where you're really proud of all you've done and you can't think of anything that would top it, or at the very least add positively to it. There's an aura of stability that envelopes a finished thought, even if it narratively it isn't complete. Trying to carry on work without having a clear idea of where you're going can be disastrous.
The best examples of this are television shows. Normally, a good show starts off pretty solid and is crafted under the careful watch of a handful of creators. But when all the brilliant ideas are exhausted before the money stream stops, you get definitive television moments like Fonzie jumping over a shark, Clark marrying Lois (no wait, it's her evil frog-eating clone!), or a 30 second JD-and-Turk-keep-just-missing-each-other joke extended for four minutes.
But what does it mean for a writer, when he becomes blocked unilaterally? Like, not just in the middle of a story (which, no I'm not in the middle of writing), but stuff he hears on the news, things that happen in his life, movies that he sees on television that, while engaging and entertaining, he feels almost minimal amount of inspiration to write about? What if the block spans his entire brain?
What does that say about the person themselves? There's dozens of quotes about higher thought being the defining characteristic that separates us from the animals (as well as hundreds about God or gods and the Mandate of Heaven, but we won't get into that here). So if you lose the creative spark, are you that much closer to devolving into a TV-watching DS-tapping monkey? What meaningful contribution can you make to society if you can't muster a comprehensive opinion about what's going on around you? And how can you keep your writing from falling into the perilous category of pretentious masturbatory introspection (which I'm not sure I even managed to do with this one)?
Admittedly, this is a much broader analysis of a simple problem, but it's one that I come across frequently. When you think too hard about the process of being creative the process itself comes under scrutiny (especially when you talk to yourself as much as I do). I literally feel worse about myself as a person because I can't write as well as I'd like to when I want to. And as much as I might be enjoying other parts of my life that I've been focusing on more lately, this one little thing plagues me, festering within my cranium until my entire mind is focused (at least temporarily) on the thought that I can't think!
