If you’re a regular reader of the Stratford Gazette newspaper, you might have noticed that my smiling face has been missing from this page the past two weeks. In fact Wandering Mind has wandered away a few times in the past year. I could say that this is simply because I’m too busy with other duties here to get a column written but such a declaration would be, to use a modern euphemism – less than genuine.
What is genuine is my desire to pump out a good piece of writing in this space week after week but sometimes I sit down at the keyboard, stare expressionless at the monitor and the monitor stares back. I blink first.
Determined, I tap out a few sentences but at moments such as those, where the creative well is dry, trying to squeeze out something good is about as possible as a chef trying to bake a wonderful pie with only mud as his main ingredient.
The phenomenon of a scribe such as I going blank is known as writer’s block and everybody pretty much understands what that is. Some writers get a little more technical and declare that their “muse” has temporarily abandoned them. Others say horsefeathers: it’s all a big excuse.
But I’m here to tell you writer’s block is real. I don’t know where it comes from just as I don’t know where inspiration comes from, but I do know if you’re blocked, your chances of producing anything anyone would want to read are about the same as a baseball pitcher pitching a no hitter with a broken arm.
I wrote my first column for the Mitchell Advocate in 1977, so I’ve been hacking away at this strange little exercise, off and on, for 31 years. My first columns were called One Day at a Time and they were serious, preachy, sentimental and now that I look back, probably depressing as well as naive.
A few years later I was tapping out The County Line in the Stratford Beacon Herald and shortly after I started it, a faithful reader commented that my sappy column on my neighbour’s dog that had just died was a total downer.
“You have a good sense of humour,” he said. “Why don’t you use that?”
Around that time, I ran across every writer’s favourite slogan: Write what you know. A light went on. I had often written on subjects I knew very little about.
So one night, armed with laptop, sitting on my couch, losing another wrestling match with WB, I noticed my two cats fighting over the same heat register. Eight registers in the house, and they both wanted the same one. How like humans, I thought. So I wrote about that and I started getting a reaction from readers. I kept it up and began to enjoy myself.
But humour, especially when you don’t feel too humourful, is probably the hardest thing to write, so homeruns from this batter, some days, are pretty hard to come by. I have found that, if a column comes flying off the keyboard (as this one seems to be doing), it will probably be passable. If I have to struggle with every word, I’d be better off not to write a column at all.
I wonder if people in other careers face similar difficulties. Do carpenters get carpenter’s block – days when they just can’t build that front porch railing or install that window because they’re blocked? Do farmers get on the tractor and then off again right away because they have farmer’s block and just can’t face the cultivator? Do exotic dancers have nights when they just can’t whip the laundry off and instead, hide in their dressing rooms?
It will pass. It always has. So be patient with me. I want to put a smile on your face every Friday but I know from experience that I can just as easily get you bawling your eyes out and I don’t think you want to go there with me.
The last thing I want to do is give you reader’s block.
Now that is a writer’s scariest nightmare.
©2008 Jim Hagarty
