Dealing with Today's Writer's Block

The first writers block of which I became aware was Hollywood writers block. I would be watching an old movie. Seated at a desk in a lovely rustic New England home, a handsome, pipe smoking, author would be tearing another piece of paper from his Underwood. A silken haired, statuesque woman would move in from behind, wearing nothing but a satin robe and a glass of scotch, touch his shoulder and beg him softly, "Give it a break for a while. It will come to you eventually. I made you a drink"

Give me a break. He is in a beautiful remote country home with a sultry seductress. He just spent part of his advance from the publisher to stock the bar. The woman knows he has a bunch of cash and is willing to offer her services. He is wondering why he can't be creative at the typewriter? That is the type of writers block that made me decide, when very young, that I wanted to be a writer - for Playboy.

Now here it comes decades later. Real writers block. It is, for that novelist, the inability to come up with an idea or even to find the right words, I guess. For most of us it is a short lived, yet chronic, annoyance that has several causes and symptoms.

• I hate this topic - That is either boredom or a challenge that is quite difficult or geared to the other sex. The solution is to not take the work if you do not like the topic. Unless of course it is a challenge that motivates you.  If not, your writing will probably show your disdain. You owe your clients your best work and nothing less. 
• I am sick of this topic - You are very good at writing under that umbrella and that is why people keep giving you more. It may no longer seem like a challenge but you are at least appreciated.
• Monday sucks compared to the weekend - There are two solutions here. Work all weekend while everyone else is having fun, then drink alone on Monday; or realize that although you make your own hours, some of them are still going to be Monday.
• I just can't get started - This is called the inertia block. It happens to people on exercise programs too. Once you overcome the tendency to remain at mental rest or in weekend mode, you will begin to get into it. When you are finished you will feel good because your mind has had a workout.
• Blockhead block - This is when you get out of bed and everything and everyone annoys you. You are pissed off at your editor, clients, your spouse, your letter carrier and Matt Lauer and you want to go into the kitchen and cook all day, watch daytime TV or go fishing. The last thing you want to do is write about how to repair grease filters or craft a web page for a pet groomer. If today is the deadline, deal with it and take off tomorrow. If you have plenty of time, blow off the day and enjoy yourself. You are burning out and you need a break. If not you may die and go to rewrite hell where nothing you submit will be acceptable for eternity.  

As a writer of many topics, that provide for me varying degrees of interest and satisfaction, I do experience various forms of writers block from time to time. My wife never comes to me with a scotch neat and reassuring words at mid morning. I rely on something that I have, and all other writers need if they want to survive. It is called discipline. Discipline is the the boss you hated that always showed up for work no matter how bad the weather was. It is the teacher that made you write Massachusetts one hundred times on the blackboard until you could never spell it incorrectly again. As much as you resented them, you always show up at your desk on time and get the job done and never let a misspelling slide by. 

T.O.L.

I was in the middle of proof reading, which requires complete, unbroken, focus. Out of nowhere I hear my wife blurt out “Why would she ever say that?  Is she kidding?”

“Say what? Who?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was thinking out loud.”

Now that could be really frightening if everyone did that, I thought.  A moment later the letter carrier walked in front of my office windows which are very near to the walk. What if he was thinking out loud?  I shuddered a second at that thought and went back to work.               

Then it happened to me. I was reading a line I wrote and I said “No that sounds like crap. What’s that word?  Hmmm.  Fortuitous. That’s it. Not lucky. The fortuitous events that led the chance meeting...”

“What?”  asked the voice from the kitchen.

“TOL.” I said.  “Not important.”

“Huh?”

“TOL,” I repeated. “Thinking out loud.”

I realized that day that I think out loud all the time when I write, and began to wonder if I could even write with my mouth shut. So I decided to try it.  It was as difficult as not biting a life saver until there is nothing left but hole. The self control was causing me face cramps.  TOL was a habit that I developed but fortunately there were no studies linking it to anything worse.  So I decided instead of stopping I would just listen to myself and make mental notes. I actually thought about recording myself but then I would have progressed from disturbed to psychotic, so I stuck to listening to myself, device free.

Here is what I heard. I curse way too much when I TOL. I also use hand gestures simultaneously, as if my slow computer can really see how annoyed I am.  I ask myself questions that I have no answer for.  I tell myself that I am hungry. Actually I tell God I am starving but I don’t mean to. He probably laughs at me. What if God thought out loud? 

  I do actually TOL a few things that help me like reading a run on sentence aloud, slicing it up, reading it out loud again. Or is that ROL?  Hmmm. Not sure. But from now on I am going to post what I TOL on this blog and see if others can relate.  If no one can, I will think that I must be out of my mind – out loud of course.  

Looking Out

To look out is a male trait that is derived from being a protector. If you observe two women standing on a bridge and conversing, they will always face each other, making constant eye contact. On the contrary, two men will always face the water and look out from the bridge. In rural areas,  a farmer and his dog may be seen on the porch in the evening looking out towards the road. They are actually watching for danger approaching but probably do not realize it until that bear walks up the driveway.

As I sit at my laptop I find myself peering over the screen and through the window of my office. Outside the view is of mostly red cedar trees and one small decorative deciduous tree from which hang bird feeders. There are no marauding tribes, or bandits and never any wild animals larger than myself except for one misplaced whitetail buck that wandered though searching for a female at 3 AM. I wanted to tell him that nothing good happens after midnight. There is, however, smaller fauna that have actually caused me to keep a pair of binoculars next to my chair. I often wonder who else even notices it.

My condo is on a parcel of land that is 30 feet or so above the Manasquan River in New Jersey. There are many tall trees, some of which are dead. It is not uncommon for a pair of bald eagles to perch in the limbs, along with several species of hawk. The small tree that stands alone outside my window is host to cardinals, goldfinches, warblers, chickadees and many other species of bird. There are also Blackhawk helicopters in the sky every so often, which must come from the nearby Earle Weapons Station and summer brings the banner planes that fly along the nearby beaches. I have also witnessed magnificent displays of forked, cloud to ground lightning in the distance and an occasional rainbow.Then there is that large pink cloth thing that landed on the top branch of an 80 foot tree during Sandy. I still do not know what it is but it is very big like an awning or sail.

Looking out is actually a healthy habit that gives my eyes a break from the computer and exercises the eye muscles by focusing in the distance. I often point out what I see to my wife who shows little interest if any. She will usually make a remark about how I must have stared out the window in grade school. I did a great deal. I was even looking out back then.

Saturday Doesn't Matter Day

I finally finished up a grueling project that I made the mistake of taking. I had never considered how many issues there would be with spell checker which red lined everything that was a brand name. Then, every brand name had to have either a registered or a trademark symbol following it. The articles were for new cars and there were seven of them at 1500 words each. They all contained terms like i-VTEK System. (Lower case "i" and upper case everything else) followed by a TM in a little circle. Every page had dozens of these for several different car models. Then it was writing which options came with which models, standard or upgrade, and with which package. Each article took the entire day to write, between research and transposing information. So fast forward to today. It is Saturday and I am caught up. Not really. I am writing this.

This is my profile that I send to potential clients and I also use it to show aspiring freelance writers what the real writing world is like. Because I have been busy, I have neglected it. If potential clients see you neglect your own profile they may assume that you will neglect them. Or they will think you are too busy for them. The truth is if I was too busy I would not need to update my profile. In fact I would not have solicited more work. I was busy yesterday but I am not yet again. So here sit I, while my wife is out to the Sea Spa and having lunch at Rods Old Irish Tavern with a girlfriend whose husband is also working today..

After I am finished venting here, I will be moving on to writing an article that I do not get paid for. It is to show prospective clients that I write well about nature and the environment. It is also to drive web traffic to a bird watching forum that I have the SEO assignment for. I am killing two birds with....hmmmm. Bad analogy. So I will spend my day researching Atwater's Prairie Chicken and the decline of the Texas Gulf Prairie. My wife will probably be done with her pedi by then and halfway into a fillet of fresh fried flounder. (Wasn't that called alliteration in English class?)

Once I am comfortable with my research and outline, I will sleep on it and write the text tomorrow. I have this weird brain that only recalls facts and details well after sleeping. There is a name for it in the psych world. I will look up the term and tomorrow I will remember what it is after I sleep on it. Actually it is neuronal memory representation reactivation. Try to remember that with or without sleeping on it.

The one thing they say about working from home is that you can make your own hours. That is so true, and lots of them. There is always something positive in every situation however. It is not nice outside so I do not mind being in as much as if it were. Do I sound like Yogi Berra?

Shore-gonomics

The chair owned by Levi F Ward, of Piermont NY circa 1850
Very hard to sit in for more than an hour

  Rio Beach Chair from Manasquan CVS circa 2011
Shore-gonomically correct

A while back I wrote a post about my antique chair that belonged to a man who lived back in the 1850s in Piermont, New York. I know he was the first secretary of the Wawayanda Lodge, had a wife and several children, a stove business and a sore butt. I deduced  the butt part because I was spending long hours in his chair at my desk and I suffered the same. It all looked very Hawthornesque, which would be fine if I were writing in my best hand by the light of a whale oil lamp. The fact is I am typing, with three fingers, in my lap. Two index fingers for the letters and the little right one for the backspace key. The desk is only for putting the laptop down so I can stand up and get off my aching posterior.

I decided I needed to find an ergonomic chair. I did not want one of those black things that they sell at Office Max. They remind me too much of an office cube. I thought about where I can sit for the longest without needing to get up. Then I realized it was a beach chair. A bright and colorful beach chair. Even if I sat in the yard I would remain for hours without getting up except for retrieving a beer. Would it work in my office? Why not? No one can see me anyway behind the over grown bush. So that was my revelation. Along with the chair I added some guy stuff to make me feel briny. Some wooden crates, some vintage fishing tackle, old Atlantic City fudge and taffy containers and an old amber bottle that contained medicine for curing sore butts in the 19th century. The results are increased productivity, more creativity, and comments from my wife about the pile of junk in my office. It not junk its shore-gonomically correct office furnishings.

There is a marketing side to this too. On my new blog, which is coming soon, called Freelance After Fifty, I can tell people that I make money sitting in my beach chair. I don't have to tell them that my only view is an overgrown bush and a hummingbird feeder. The important thing is I am comfortable and my writing reflects it, when I am not daydreaming about being on the beach with my fishing pole.
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Hitting the Afternoon Wall

What is it about mid afternoon that makes a man want to nod off regardless of how well he slept the night before? I try to get eight hours sleep each night and be at my work station between 7:30 and 8:00 each weekday morning. I always eat breakfast, either before I start or an hour or so later. When lunch time rolls around I usually take 30 minutes and watch the news at noon and have a light meal which is typically a half a sandwich and a bottled water or maybe something from the night before like left over meatballs and spaghetti. The latter is an invitation to an afternoon carb crash but the former should not be. This seems to be an issue more for men than for women.

As sure as the sun glares through the blinds, between 3 and 4  I start to get heavy eyelids. One friend told me I should drink more water. Another suggested I should eat a piece of fresh fruit around 3 o'clock to ward off the day shift sandman. Neither of these worked. The water had its expected results and the fruit seemed to make me more tired.

One day I realized that it might be normal for a man to fall asleep for 30 minutes in the afternoon and it was the perception of women that napping was a product of laziness. That was my motivation for researching the subject. I discovered that Thomas Edison frequently fell asleep while working. My wife said that was why it took him so long to invent anything. I read that power naps increased productivity at the end of the day. My wife said it was an excuse to work late. I decided to try giving in to my urge to nod out at my desk for 30 minutes to see for myself how I would fare.  How did my wife know, from the other room, that I fell asleep?
 The door burst open and she asked abruptly, "Your not sleeping are you?"
Not anymore.

Lightly Deprived

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SADs) is caused by sunlight deprivation. Commonly called cabin fever, it is an actual medical condition. I never experienced it before I became a freelance writer. I don’t live in a cabin and my body temperature in the winter is no higher than any other time, but I do start feeling a little bored and lethargic. As I have mentioned in previous post’s, I work in the corner of a room that has two standard size windows. These windows face south and have blinds. When the sun does shine, at a low winters angle, I am forced to close the blinds due to glare and to eliminate the striped pattern across my keyboard. Lately I have moved into the living room to work where there is a slider that faces north to the parking area of my condo complex. I have gotten familiar with the seagull breakfast club that meets at 6:30 every morning on the roof of the building across the way. Today they must be discussing their Vatican star that brought them into the spotlight by perching on the chimney just prior to the white smoke appearing. Then there is the thin, spry woman who walks in any weather and passes by at precisely 7:15 every morning.  She probably has avoided her cabin fever. I give her credit. Meanwhile, as I sit in the same place all day, I feel as if I am stretching toward the window and becoming thin and leggy like a house plant with inadequate exposure. Pretty soon my neck will no longer support my head and my wife will need to stake me up in my chair with a broom and bungee cord. 

It seems like this year we have only had a about a weeks worth of sunny days since January. Add to that the early season trauma caused by Sandy, and the subsequent Nor'easter  and you have a recipe for the blues. In the summer, in New Jersey, the term blues means a fishing trip but this season it means melancholia.  A fishing trip sounds good but it must wait at least another month. Football has ended for the season so my weekends are spent indoors in stores with my wife. There are no flea markets or yard sales so even if stubborn Mr. Sun should show up there is no place to enjoy him. In the Northeast sunny also means a cold, blustery, northwesterly flow of air.  

St Patrick's Day is being celebrated by the parade in New York on Saturday the 16^th which is one day early. It is going to be cold and damp as it usually is. Fortunately the winter begins to wane soon. The days are getting longer. I bought some seeds for peas and radishes and the sowing instructions say I can plant them as soon as I can work the soil. That will at least get me into the sun for a couple of hours. That is contingent on Mr. Sun showing up for work instead of  moonlighting in those Jimmy Dean commercials.