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.