The 3 kinds of writer's block

“I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible.”

– Roy Blunt, Jr.

I’ve been writing actively in journals, newspapers, magazines and blogs for the last 5 years, and the writer’s block has been relentlessly pursuing me all the time. If I don’t write for 3 or 4 days in a row, I can’t think of anything at all the 5th day. Or, alternatively, if I’ve been writing vigorously for a week, then taking even a small break after seems adverse – it feels as if all my ideas have been exhausted although I know I have thought of something worthwhile to be put down. So, the following is about the 3 kinds of writer’s block I think there are, and what I write is based on my experiences only.

1. Surplus of choices: By calling it the ‘surplus of choices’, I mean that the writer has too many ideas and doesn’t know which one to pick and elaborate on. In this case, the core cause could be conflicting priorities. Not knowing what to write about, in general, could be a statement of one’s ignorance or inadequate knowledge. However, there is also the other possibility where a writer can’t choose between two topics because he finds them both equally important but is not availed the opportunity to indulge in both of them. I’ve had the misfortune to be in such a situation quite a few times, especially when I’m faced with an audience with high expectations.
2. Fear of approach: This reason I think explains itself. Like the quote says at the beginning of this post, most people are daunted by the fear of failure or of not meeting expectations (which may not amount to the same thing). If they start working with such a mindset, what happens is that they question each and every one of their next moves to the point where they lose confidence in what they’re doing. If there’s no confidence, then there’s not going to be any conviction. This morale will eventually avalanche into the writer discarding his or her attempts at continuing to write. There’s also a subsequent chance of this mood upsetting all other projects at hand.
3. Exhaustion of thought: When I’m exhausted of all thoughts, I mean that I’m in a state of mind that’s like a combination of the first 2 types. I might just have completed a writing task and somehow find that, as a result, I’ve used up all my literary devices and techniques in one post instead of saving some techniques for the upcoming ones. So, now, 2 things face me: I have to come up with something suitable to write on as well as judge for myself as to whether it would satiate my literary goals. What I don’t like in this case that whenever I think of something new, I also seem to find an excuse to discard it in favor of another topic. This goes on and on until I’m back on square: nothing in hand, nothing in head.

The interesting thing about any form of the writer’s block is that there’s always only one cure: by doing what it prevents you from doing. Keep writing no matter what. Refering to the quote again, don’t be afraid to write badly, absolute nonsense even. You’ll find that it will come your aid in the long run. When I write gibberish, two things happen to me. First is that I’m inspired by my own (often drab) creativity. When I write a meaningless paragraph and read it again, I’m able to see that I’m headed somewhere but am not able to guide myself properly. In that process, I’m able to identify a topic I seem interested in. Second, I slowly begin to construct longer sentences with broader meanings – in other words, I begin to construct ideas on the go. In the first case, I drew the big picture.In the second, I stuff it with the kind of information that also gives me the foundation.

But over and above everything else, writer’s block is there only if you want it to be. And like all unfortunate experiences, it’s easier said than done. However, I do know of some people who continue to write even thought it’s visible that they’ve hit an ideological wall. If you want to get there too, you must understand what’s happening within you. I’ve written here what happens within me. Is it the same for you? Or not?

An ode to reading

Imagine a sunny morning, with the sunshine streaming in through your curtains of linen, while you lie in bed, a comfortable bed, the weather perfectly complimenting your mood. There is a sparrow on the window sill, chirping away unto the glory of a perfect dawn, mindful of the realization that such dawns are not common to say the least. A gentle wind is blowing outside, the leaves of the tree elegantly swaying in an unspoken rhythm. This is when I would suggest you open Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow’, recline on those soft pillows, and commence.

Writer's Block, Be Damned Thou!

For someone aspiring to work in a newspaper, writer’s block is an evil sickness. It is physical as well as mental. It cripples your fingers and blights your mind. It throws you overboard from a speeding ship, leaving you to wonder where the hell you are in an ocean of words. Your tongue grows numb and sentences no longer flow as easily as they used to. However, one important thing I have observed about it is this: the writer’s block only overcomes you in such awesome proportions when you have spent weeks together writing incessantly about all kinds of this. Your words, then, literally are spent, exhausted, and there’s no way to bring them back if you can’t tear down the wall. Tear down the wall? Tear down the wall! Preposterous! My tools have been stolen from me, and they’re stowed away behind a wall I’m supposed to tear down with those tools. It’s Biggleman’s safe all over again. Of all the things I imagined could spell doom to a writer, I never thought it would be a mental block. I imagined paralysis, gangrene, amputations, leprosy, and what else not, but not the writer’s block. At least, with the other illnesses, you could feed off public sympathy and have them do something for you. But with writer’s block, it’s a dead end. You can’t go up to a person and ask him to write articles for you! You have nothing to give when all you want to do is take. You feel like screaming, but all that comes out is a muted rage. It’s like you’re watching ‘LoTR’ for the first time, and just when the Witch King of Angmar is about to kill Gandalf on Minas Tirith, the power gets cut. It’s heart breaking.

I was on a roll, I tell you. I had uncovered this wonderful new article on time as a physical quantity, and somehow managed to worm my way to the idea of God as a teleological consequence – it turns me on, I tell you! – when the words snap. Yesterday, I had such a hard time trying to differentiate between form-following-function and function-following-form, I lost my appetite. My god, it is demeaning. Demeaning? Where did that come from? Oh yes, demeaning! It’s like some god gave you eyes and then blindfolded them. It’s degrading to be subjected to such torture. You not only question your very presence, but also that of your purpose. It’s like being gifted the Thrust 2 and then having your limbs cut off. It’s like being handed a million cartons of cigarettes but not a lighter. It’s like, in short, being handed a paradox. How do you use a paradox? Its effect negates the cause, which in turn negates the effect itself; the effect is a contradiction of itself! Oh, this is killing me. That’s another thing the writer’s block is: a labyrinth. If you’ve got in, then there’s only one way and you have no idea where that is unless you are prepared to look. And I am looking! There are no markings, no sign posts, I don’t even have a wand like Hari Puttar, no Mad Eyes to guide me, and the worst part is, some of the walls are disjointed. If you place your palm on the face of a wall and begin to walk without ever detaching from the surface, you have a good chance of ending up going round and round in circles.

Science has to catch up soon, I tell you. Just concoct some pill for it. Taken with a glass of hot water, it should induce a severe case of verbosity. Watching ‘Big Bang Theory’ and reading about the LHC, I’m surprised scientists can do so much more but not this. They can tear apart the smallest of the small things, they can put together the biggest of machines to do that, but not a pill to cure sick me. Cocktails for cancer, DNA combinatorics for AIDS, nothing for the writer’s block. Yes, I am being unreasonable! I am allowed to be unreasonable! Where are my words?! Do I lodge a complaint with the police? Because that’s all I can think of!

Stupid muted rage.   

Blowing off some hiatus steam!

Bouncing back is dramatic, and also a good candidate for cinematic. Bouncing back is megalomania, bouncing back is refusal to quit, bouncing back is getting back up after you’ve been knocked down by a rabid Tyson – someone you would hardly expect to be standing right outside your room. But bouncing back is not easy, especially when you’re recovering from losing your life’s work in a matter of twenty minutes.

I was left wandering aimlessly in the corridors of the heartbroken’s hell: the only thing missing was a beard but that’s not my fault, it simply refused to grow. One of the very, very few things I’ve ever put all my faith in – and money when I get it – is my writing. And I had embarked on the command of a dream to write a grandiose book, a book of comedies and tragedies. It was the kind of book that had me turn a deaf ear towards anyone who had anything bad to say about it. But my stupid and jealous laptop couldn’t stand it all and decided to crash. You’ve probably read about it before in one of my earlier posts.

But I must say there’s nothing like getting back up on your feet. You just have to learn to take it all in your stride, as though it was a sign. I’m a man of science, but since science had failed me (esp. the science of my laptop’s cooling system), I turned to the paranormal. I delighted in them, I abounded in their eccentricities! I made up a story I forced myself to believe, and now, I’m back. Oh, it feels so good to be back.

But ideas don’t seem to be flowing oh-so-easily-again. I’ve spent the past few days writing three proposals, all of them impeccably formal (yes, that’s a complaint), and now, it’s gotten into my language as well. Formality is to me as the British accent is to my ex-girlfriend: you spend too much time with it, it refuses to wear off later on. I need some glasnost going on, and so, I need to blog. I’d begun to write about political correctness yesterday, but since I wasn’t writing on my beloved Samsung keyboard, I kept stumbling into typo after typo. And believe me when I tell you I don’t like typos. They’re irritating. It’s like my fingers can’t read my thoughts. The first paragraph seems so perfect, and you expect the perfection to perpetuate. But no! Stupid typo! It rapes the perfection, it drains the flow. When I write, I like to be polished. Even if I were to jot down abuse, it would have to be sans any a spelling error. It has to have grammatic parallelism. It has to have commas at the right places. And ellipses irritate me. Those three dots seem to represent some kind of undecidedness on the writer’s art, as though he or she were not in a position to express something they could otherwise easily have. Then don’t write it!

But I know I sound like some terrorist hijacking the English language. Old habits die hard, you know. It’s hard to let go. I’m a man with a vintage taste. Most of my friends would like to head down to the club, dance around, have a couple of beers and talk about football matches their fav. teams lost the week before. Me, I like to sit by the fireplace, enjoy some black tea, watch ‘LoTR’, and listen to ACDC once the movie is done. I like the silence, I like the calm, I like the laid back.

The hard part is not be ashamed of it. I’m 20, and I’ve pretty much decided what to do with my life – these decisions I’m very proud of just because I made them. But I’ve never made my peace with the decision of  liking the laid-back. There is a feeble yearning that desperately begs me to surface, but I refuse because I find the roaring fireplace more appealing. I guess it runs in my blood – from dad.

In fact, let me tell you, I read a lot of Archer. Reading about his descriptions of large common-rooms in the Oxfords and Cambridges of the world, I had a secret wish to have such and such a room built – one fine day, of course – and host a literary meeting. Just some men gathered to discuss Leftism, Castro, the economic recession, smoke a bit of pipe, grab some black tea, lay back, and enjoy the weather. Yes, the weather.

Ah, well, all that seems verily distant to me. A long time to go for that, but I for one know those dreams won’t die out. See, I think there are two kinds of dreams in this world. One will always have to do with minting money like a machine, but the other will have to be about seemingly trivial things, but the things you find the greatest hapiness with. I have a friend who dreams of making it big with the money, just like everyone does, with one dream. With the other, he plans to become a philanthropist along the lines of Bono and Geldof.

I think I’ve written enough. The writer’s block is down, and I’ll get cracking from tomorrow (I like the feeling of how some bizarre and innovative strike you only if you take a break from all that you’ve been writing!). Oh yeah, also check out this link: HARO. It’s an entrepreneurial venture by media man and adventurist Peter Shankman. It’s something I do when I’m bored, and the idea behind it is pretty good as well.

Cheers!

(And “GO WORDPRESS!” for their new theme ‘Vigilance’ – it’s awesome!)

The Writers' Crib

By the writers’ crib, I don’t mean their cribbing; I mean their tool-room, the place where they derive their ideas from, their sources of inspiration. A writer begins to write when he wishes to express his ideas, when he believes that there might be others who will want to learn of what he has learnt, understood or perceived. The language he chooses to use will be the language he finds most convenient to write in, one in which his grammar and the way he structures his sentences will reflect perfectly in the messages that the reader comes to understand. There must be no conflict, and there must be an inherent brevity that says the writer need not use an unnecessary number of words to express himself completely. The style of writing, the flavouring of the text, which he employs will deliver the mood of the text, and thereby let the reader know which side of the argument he is on, if indeed there is one. If not for an argument- well, I think there are always arguments: this conforms to my principles of a binary world! The language and the grammar decided, next is the perspective if the writer. Now, the perspective is, I think, independent of the subject at hand. Why do I think this? Because, herein the good earth I think there are a set of symbols, a set of signs, that tell us that there exist an interconnectivity between all things, objects as well as beings. Whether the writer writes of a pencil, or of the Vietnam war, he will always write in a such a manner as to reflect his perception of the world and those who inhabit it. This perception cannot be stolen from the mind’s eye, and cannot be changed easily. Perception as I would define it, is an understanding that is born from our innate personality. Moreover, this personality doesn’t come to account for our perception just by the name, but also by what it exhibits in turn: our up bringing, our religion, our nativity, our patriotism, our identity, our imbued humanity. The degree to which we adhere to these elements of our living defines our perception, and narrows it or broadens it depending on how we exercise them. And now, looking beyond the perception, there is nothing but objectification. Objectification is identification, not association. Perception is. When we perceive an object, we identify it, true, but then, we also move on to understand our relationship with it. When we believe that we have a possibly meaningful relationship in the offing, we give the object a name. By giving a name, we have established association.

When, at our most basic levels, we are confined to the mind and how it perceives the objects around us, our perception of the more complex ones follows a simple mathematical principle: we tend to break down those complex events into smaller and smaller ones, until we have in our hands a multitude of the simple events.

Now, the symbols in this earth. What are they? How do they look like? I don’t know. Are they there? Yes they are. How do you know? Let me tell you. Look at this picture.

Red 'X' in white?

What do you see in this picture? Do you see a red ‘X’ on a white page? Of course you do. Everyone does. But what everyone fails to notice is that, why do we always see only the red ‘X’? Why not the white background? Why don’t we see the white background as having a red-coloured ‘X’ shaped cavity? Or why don’t we see a white pattern on a red background?Why do we tend to prioritise the symbol over its background, and why do we not consider the background itself as a symbol to be existent? Well, in this particular case, it may have been because of the familiarity of the symbol as an alphabet, but what about a very many number of other symbols? Simply, why do we associate more with those symbols that are easier to perceive? The difficulty to perceive another symbol doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!

Imagine this. There is a stainless, white wall. Perfectly white. There is a perfectly white table in front of it. On this table is a semi-hemispherical orange bowl. If you were to stand at a distance of around 3 metres, how would you know that that orange coloured object is a bowl? First and foremost, you will know that by its shape. The curvature, and a flat section towards the bottom will tell you that it is a bowl. What gives this bowl an image of being curved? This is obtained from its relation to its background. If man had been living in a world composed only of circles, and if the line hadn’t been discovered yet, he would not know of linearity. He will be able to perceive only curvature, and therefore, he will not identify the circle for what it is. Similarly, since man knows the line, he can recognise the circle for what it is. Deriving another analogy, the shape of the bowl is understood by how it cuts out the background. In this case, you know the object is a bowl only by how a section of the wall is hidden from your sight: the section that is hidden is instead covered by an orange, semi-circular patch.

Therefore, if you were to think of it, there is a red ‘X’ on white paper, or there is a red ‘X’ shaped cavity in the white symbol that is the paper. The difference between the two is prioritisation. Through this selective prioritisation, we allot a certain density to some parameters we find easier to work with, and therefore, write about. This is the reason more than one single perception exists in the world. Look at the number of symbols you have splattered have around you in your daily life. Have you ever wondered whether the symbol you perceive is the only symbol in sight? Those for whom there seems to be no harm in this selective prioritisation can move on. But for those who are seeking a solution to something, this is some food for thought.

Abstractionism

The writer’s block has taken over me completely. This is not the first time this has happened, although I keep forgetting how I tackled it the last time. It inspires the worst of feelings to any writer: you find your mind goes blank, void of all relevant thoughts, and it also seems to have sapped your will to write. Words no longer flow as they should have, ideas seem frozen in time and incapable of propagation, and thoughts stagnate into an overwhelming lake. Your fingers go limp, no longer displaying the invigorating nimbleness that once caused your wrist to ache as you scribbled on and on. It’s a moment of deadness. You just discard the draft and move onto something else. But this time, I’m going to tackle it head-on. I can’t afford to go blank like this every time I think I’m onto something. And that is when I hit upon a way: to write of this writer’s block, to see what shape it grows into in my mind, to see what it can do to stop me from writing about itself!

The writer’s block doesn’t stop at wiping my mind of all activity. It develops into a grotesque form, probably like a gargoyle included in those landmarks of Gothic architecture, and drains what so ever I believe is relevant to the task at hand. If you think of it, it’s logic finds an analogous match with a type of electric forces in physics: they come to life only when the primary driving force acts on them. If you want a task to be done, the elements of activity resists a change in their original state of being and oppose this authoritarianism of sorts. The mind, institutionalised to being in certain phases pertaining to the form and clarity of thought at that point of time and space, refuse to conform to a need to fall in line with whimsical considerations per se. The writer’s block not only seeks to distract you from your tasks, but also blurs out the sources of your inspiration and inverts your localised philosophy; it is a subconscious response, the stimulus to which is a demand. Ultimately, the writer’s block will only strike you when you least expect it. As you build more confidence into your scripture, you open the gates to this little demon a sliver more.

Stumped?

However, by constantly keeping in mind the plausibility of hitting a dead end with wherever you’re going with whatever you’re possessing, makes you more aware of the possibility of indeed hitting a dead end. And it is only probable that you will! It is as a paradox: you think it will, and it does, for that is natural; you think it will not, but it does yet again, for you have implied that it should have! The writer’s block will not happen when you do not give thought to it at all in any of your preconsiderations while commencing your treatise. The moment you include it in your deliberations in any form, it will raise its hood. Probably like God: whther you’re a priest, an agnostic. or a fanatic, the principles of godliness will haunt you in your decisions. But when you’re an atheist, all your decisions, which may have imbued in them the signs of godliness, will not, however, reflect godliness. It’s like an abstract painting: you see what you want to see, but the moment you see what you never did want to, that which you have seen will remain in sight. It’s a horror movie: it will have the images stick in your head once you’re scared, but when you know it’s all a synthesised play of the images, you will be reminded of the artistic talents involved in making the movie to what it is. You shouldn’t know what’s going on in the background, for if you do, the illusion is lost!

And there goes my writer’s block! The sign of the cross, the name of the rose! The surrealistic style of writing has always inspired me to move on. I remember a comment left by Canadian author Cliff Burns left on my blog earlier: “I am often surprised as to what such attempts can yield…”. Surprising indeed! The circumnavigation of the block has always loomed as a good option: I try jumping to other ideas and other philosophies, but I always forget the block is rooted not in my thought, but in my thinking.

A Museum For Memories

After having blogged for some 2 1/2 years with considerable success (in terms of viewers and comments), I finally reached a point where my blog was part of my life as it was. Just like I would wake up, brush, bather and head for college as though I was born to do those things, I would sit and write for an hour in the evening. And I wrote on whatsoever popped into my head, whether at tea-time when I drank my tea in complete silence while watching some kids play cricket in the nearby field, or be it when I picked my keyboard up from its place under the bed and onto my lap. Also, I don’t tend to write when there is a silence around me. It seems as though I’m sitting in an auditorium, surrounded by irritatingly curious people trying to see what I am doing. I like to be in the midst of a crowd of people, but each one minding his or her own business. That way, it feels like I am part of a bigger world around me, a world that has content waiting to be blogged(!), while at the same time a world which has been good enough to promise one of its dwellers the privacy to do his work. And so, I turn on some music (which is usually Danger – Keep Away by Slipknot). And ever since my laptop keyboard stopped functioning, I haven’t been able to write in the dark. I use this new plug-in pad to type, and as a compensation for the glaring light of the tubelights, the keys are nice and bouncy! So here we are: I write for an hour everyday in my own little customised environment. And in doing so, I’ve learnt more about writing and all its nuances. The little intricacies, the ways in which you can twist the whole thing without distorting its meanings, the ways in which you can use words to enforce a tiring session of reading-between-the-lines on the reader, and then have the whole passage smile innocently with a bit of subtle humour. But that’s only as far as writing goes. But what about the blog?

It becomes a close relative. I mean, c’mon, IT listens to everything I have to say, and I’ve used it more than once to wreak havoc in the minds of my friends 😛 (like some instrument of chaos!). Of late, however, my writer’s block reached a peak and became a period of its own. The look and feel of my blog weren’t somehow inspiring me enough, and looking back and through all my older posts, I felt as though I had exhausted all my topics and options of things to write about. If I looked for inspiration somewhere, it was though whatever I could have managed to come up with was already there. I even picked up a whole lot of books form the library in order to keep my own novel-in-the-making moving, but nope. Everywhere I went, through every page I crawled, there was only a wall in the end, and whatever I did to look for that special, secret brick in the wall, it was just another brick. Being the same as everyone else never felt so depressing. I did the same things everyday as everyone else, but when the time came in the evenings when I do nothing but sit and sate at my laptop screen, I was worse than everyone else. I was exhausted when I should have been gearing up for something bigger later on. I couldn’t plagiarise in peace! Every time I used some words of Churchill to keep me going, it felt as though Sir C was looking down at me from heaven or hell (where ever he is) and daring me to continue. I have never plagiarised before, but the intention to even begin anew has been defeated. So what did I do?

I deleted my blog on a whim! I don’t know which jackass does that, but by doing so, I felt fresh. Don’t ask me how. Maybe it’s the feeling you get when you have a break up, can’t get over your girlfriend, but see the difference when you burn her picture and flush it down the toilet. It was as though I was taking revenge on a biologically existent being capable of feelings. I have no idea as to how my blog must have felt, but being a page that received some 300 viewers daily, it should have felt pretty bad that it received only such an unceremoniously drab end after such a good run. A blog of 2 years and gone in a flash! Well, I can’t say I started writing furiously and passionately after that. Being WordPress, I couldn’t get the name of the blog back and I had to look for something else. Something that would be neutral enough entice me into forcing it to take sides in each one of my posts that would come up under it. And finally, after a lot of jumping around and Importing and Exporting, I landed on The MV Journal. M V are my initials. After all this, what’s the moral of the story?

Regardless of whatever I do, whatever I write, where ever I write it, the feelings I have towards my work seems to matter the most. I’ve always cherished writing, and not just as a form of art. I’ve used it with great effect to relieve the pent up energy I feel within me at times, I’ve used it with even greater effect to unblock my head of unwanted and walling thoughts. Once, when I had the writer’s block, I wrote about it and then tore down the wall. To a man who loves his work, it will never seem as though he is working to get what he wants. It will always seem as though it was something he was born to do, and that’s how I feel. I could keep writing forever, but if only for myself. In trying to place the blame of your block and of your monotonous rhetoric on the same topics over and over again on the look and feel of your creation, you are betraying the trust of the text on you. If only you can make the words feel like you do when you pen them down, then you will know that beyond merely being a form of communication, those patterns on the paper are your trails on the face of the world. Be it a blog for self-expression, be it a newspaper for information, be it a letter to a loved one for affection, all these things will let people know of hidden dramas, the tragedy and the comedy tucked away in their folds if only you choose to look for them. Your words are your brush strokes on the canvas of the world, to be hung one fine day in a museum built for memories.

The Room

With the advent of NaNoWriMo08, I suddenly feel a surge inside me, as though the writing spirit that had hibernating within for so many days had been summoned to the surface of my mind, blocking out every thought that didn’t pertain to it. I have been busy for quite some time now with the creation of some blogs for other people and one even for my college’s music club, but that was a welcome change than what I would usually have done otherwise. I have always wanted to do something that others around me wouldn’t do at that point of space and time – and not just because I would stand out. It was because I wanted to know what the consequences of such an action would be. I have always wanted to read the mind of nothingness, the mind of the black hole, the mind of nullity itself. I know you won’t be following me here, so let me elaborate with an example. Imagine a nice dorm room, and imagine that it has been nicely set up with all kinds of relevant infrastructure and paraphernalia. Now, let’s say someone lives in this room, uses it, delivers to it a look and feel that can only otherwise be found in a life form. At the end of it, the room in your imagination must be a room that has housed life. Now, the person living in the room walks out and doesn’t remain for quite some time. What goes on inside the room? Do the shelves creak because something has been left behind? Do they sense a disturbance? Is there some sort of an imbalance? Does the room sigh? One will never know these things because I think The Room is capable of doing this only when no one, absolutely no one, is watching it – either by walking into it or via a camera mounted in a seemingly corner. The Room can, of course, have no corners that it doesn’t know of. So what does The Room do when it does something? Does it come to life too? I wonder how it would feel to chronicle the life of The Room. I have always wanted to write a story along such lines. This thought first had its seed sown in my mind’s eye and my imagination when I realised such a story would require no character development if not for the feelings and the character development of The Room itself. I can have The Room feel anyway I want it to; I could even be so magnanimous as to let The Room assume a mind and personality of its own and battle with, on and on until the day we come to a decision as to this is what The Room has been trying to say all the time. Furthermore, no dialogues. No change of scenes. The props used in the beginning to associate the behaviour of The Room with an event/action we could relate to, and therefore derive opinionatedness and judgment from, will be the same throughout the story. But the problem has always been the beginning. How could one use a few words to imbue The Room with a mind, some feelings, and a tangibility, a feeling that The Room is present amongst us, in such a way that The Room itself inspires me to write more? In other words, how do I become The Room?

I have had a few ideas about that, too. But they don’t seem to embody the inspiration I will have to rely on later on. You might think it is all up to me to script the perfect beginning in order to even be deserving of The Room’s help later on. But then, you won’t be looking at the heart of my problem. The heart is that I can write, yes. Writing is not an issue, but what can The Room come to associate itself with that I can also associate myself with? I can’t readily become the room myself. (Writer’s block and 25 minutes later…) Even if there exists a Room that has a sense of belonging and the very right to exist, the WHY part of it all stymies me. I can’t write a novel just because I’m writing one, can I? I can’t put together a string of words and declare it to be a sentence just by placing a period at the end. There’s a line from the Tool song ‘Schism’ that comes to me: “Right now, the pieces fit/ Because I watched them fall away…”. That is what it is! At the end of the game, I can look upon my creation as a novel only when it is actually one, only when you can expect everything that you’ve put down to come to life any second – be it in a movie, or in someone else’s mind. But The Room always fails to do these things when I write about it. My circumnavigation of the problem of a lack of the ability to spawn spontaneous character development on my part has landed at the question itself. If you know a way, do share it.

I would like The Room to come alive soon.

Ctrl+F, A Ghost, and The Writer's Block: Where Am I?

The text editor (Mr. TE) in WordPress is a very good friend of mine. Mr. TE has been there to see me go on and on about all kinds of things, some of which did not even concern the respected gentleman. This is one post where I have something to say about Mr. TE: the gentleman comes with a property wherein he allows me to resize him according to my wishes. His breadth is, of course, his to decide about, but his length falls under my perusal every time I visit his humble abode. And now I’ve realised that I like it that way. Why? Because whenever I feel I need to write more about something that I am thinking about, I make the box large and open, which is something of an invitation, a call to fill it up with words and ideas. As for this post, I do have lots to write (I think), but around me, there is no one. Alone in my darkened room, I sit with absolutely nothing to do. I wish i had a search bar somewhere in front of me. I could enter something, some key words, some tags, some categories, and perhaps something would show up.

I have always sought peace and calm, and that seems to happen only in the absence of everything around me except myself. When I write, I see myself floating in front of me like a ghost. It is no hallucination but only a convincingly elusive conception of the mind. But today, the ghost is not home. And I may have my writer’s block. I usually get it when I write about things that hold meaning for me and about which I try desperately to tell others. But today’s post is stranger: I seem to have lost my joy in writing, and I feel sapped of all literary endowments. You may notice it as I jump from idea to idea without bothering to lay a bridge between them; it is like a post that has been written to be read by me again, but in the future. Probably trigger some deja vu. Communication has failed. There is a wall (Pink Floyd?) between my fingers and my thoughts, and I don’t know whence they come. This disorientation is killing me. Even if I had been trapped in trying to demystify some catch-me-if-you-can intricate logic of a paradox, I would have oriented myself to some sort of hypothesizing, some mathematical assumptions, and moved on to try my luck at it. But I have now realised now that writing is different. Writing is when you create something out of nothing. Can you tell me where adjectives come from? Some imperceptible quantification of feelings that varies from person to person? That is hardly a definition. But that is all I see, and I don’t know whether you can understand me or not. I could convey my perception of the objects around me through the usage of words, but they would be lifeless. Merely a suspension of 1s and 0s on some screen in front of you, digital data for you to interpret and quantify on your own. But writing exists because it is inherently involved with the expressive communication of one’s perceptions.

This is no writer’s block, as I seem to be writing (500+ words now) sans a pause – as yet. But my arms seem flaccid, and my fingers seem to be typing of their own free will. A magical spell, ‘abracadabra’, the wave of a wand, a rags to riches author, a million dollar movie. I have now even lost track of whatever I started with. (Having scrolled up to read the first paragraph,) I remember now. The gentlemanly text editor who has been kind enough to reconsider the dimensions of his rich (albeit two dimensional) existence now provides solace to a lost writer. He, Mr. TE, when resized to a small box with a shy two-line exposure of my ideas, now seems different.

He now seems to say, “Look! It’s only the two of us now, and a fine day it seems as yet. I hope I can be your ghost.”

(Approx. fog index: 10.83)