Skip to main content

Beat Writer’s Block



I wanted to write a blog post today just to beat my blues. Words refused to rise in my veins. When words don’t flow out of your veins, they will sound hollow. So I shut down the laptop and moved out to the garden. The weeds had overgrown and they were smothering my garden plants, thanks to the recent rains. Weeds are like your blues: they love to smother whatever is good around them. I pulled up my jeans, put on the garden boots, picked up a knife and a pair of gloves, and stepped into the garden. An hour or so, and the weeds lay dead in green heaps that exuded their heady tang. I stood back and looked at the garden. My blues had vanished long ago. Despondence is a form of energy and I had unleashed it mercilessly on the weeds. The garden looked thankful.
I relaxed a while breathing in the cool air that accompanied the setting sun. After a detailed shower, I switched on the laptop again. No. Words rebelled against my veins again. I wanted to continue the book which I have been writing now for quite a while. “Not now,” my veins said.
I remembered reading quite many blog posts in the last one week alone about writer’s block. Quite many bloggers had written on that subject and I didn’t find their suggestions really helpful. So I decided to launch my surfing board into the endless ocean of the internet.
Quite a few psychologists have studied writer’s block, I discovered. I found one of their suggestions very helpful. I realised that I had used it a number of times though I was not aware of the study carried out by the psychologists and their suggestions.
Write a dream sequence. That’s the suggestion. You’re not going to publish what you write. You’re writing something as you dream it while you are totally awake. It’s just a dream, something you make up just to unfetter you from your blues. You can dream about anything.
The famous novelist Graham Greene actually kept a dream diary just for dealing with his writer’s block. [It’s interesting to note that even a prolific and eminent writer like Greene had to grapple with writer’s block.] One of Greene’s entry began thus:
I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line— ‘Beauty makes crime noble’—when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. ‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a moustache.
I had used this method quite effectively many times. I once dreamt that I was one of the soldiers of Alexander the Great, one of the many that rebelled against him standing on the bank of the Beas River. The end result was a story: And quiet flowed the Beas.
Interestingly, I have dreamt many times as joining Eliot’s Prufrock on his historic evening walk. My dreams didn’t stop at being exercises to overcome the writer’s block; most of the time, they became something worthy of publication.


Comments

  1. I am reading 'HItchhker's guide to the Galaxy'. After reading your post, am sure this book also must have been written to beat the writers' block!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Since sci-fi doesn't fascinate me, I haven't read the Hitchhikers. Fantasy is a great way to shatter blocks, I'd agree.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Nazneen’s Fate

N azneen is the protagonist of Monica Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane (2003). Born in Bangla Desh, Nazneen is married at the age of 18 to 40-year-old Chanu Ahmed who lives in London. Fate plays a big role in Nazneen’s life. Rather, she allows fate to play a big role. What is the role of fate in our life? Let us examine the question with Nazneen as our example. Nazneen was born two months before time. Later on she will tell her daughters that she was “stillborn.” Her mother refused to seek medical help though the infant’s condition was critical. “We must not stand in the way of Fate,” the mother said. “Whatever happens, I accept it. And my child must not waste any energy fighting against Fate.” The child does survive as if Fate had a plan for her. And she becomes as much a fatalist as her mother. She too leaves everything to Fate which is not quite different from God if you’re a believer like Nazneen and her mother. When a man from another continent, who is more than double her age,...

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...