Write for God

“Stop writing. You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.”

(Author Gore Vidal, to those who have writer’s block)

Sometimes, for various reasons, I’ll take a break from blogging for a day or two. Usually, it’s a heavy schedule at work and home, but sometimes it’s the pull of another writing project. This past week, my entries have been thin because of despair over issues related to finances, which have affected my sleep and my ability to approach issues with a rational mind. Better to take a break than to write a bad Dickensian blog post.

I’ve never really had writer’s block, that dread of the blank page or the blank post. I guess being opinionated comes easily to me or perhaps it’s my constant habit of writing in pads and notebooks. For some people I know, a blank page inspires more dread than a bloodied hacksaw in a slasher film. I know intelligent people who turn into zombies when they’re told to write something.

 In one of our favorite goofy comedies, Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a big-time sportswriter who retires to write a great novel. He and his wife move to a rustic home where everything goes wrong, especially with his novel. In one funny scene, the ex-sportswriter finally sits at his desk to begin his novel, types The to begin a sentence and then freezes into a terminal state of bad writing and writer’s block. As Vidal suggests, for everyone who can’t write, there are more in the wings who have no trouble creating worlds or music with words.

Here are some ways to avoid writer’s block that always work for me:

• Fill the blank page with something, anything, to begin. Write the lyrics to that song in your head at the moment or your favorite limerick. A white page with something on it fools the eye into thinking you’ve written something.
• Begin writing badly. Rewrite later.
• Play music you enjoy when you sit down to write. It’s amazing how the rhythms of the music will move your fingers to type as it moves your feet to tap out the tempo.
• If you’re on the keyboard, switch to a pad and pen. If writing by hand, go to the computer or typewriter. Mix things up.
• Open a random page in a book you enjoy and retype a paragraph or two. The habit of forming words will move you to begin writing.
• Change location. Our local library has private rooms for study or work where a writer can bring a laptop or pad to write in silence and without interruptions. Each spring in school, we would beg the teacher to have class outside. Sometimes he or she complied and we took our lit books outdoors. It would put our lessons in a different light — literally.
• Surround yourself with the beauty of words. Listen to books on tape, write in a cafe bookstore or find records or CDs of poets reading their work. A teacher once played us an album of Jack Kerouac riffing his poetry with Zoot Sims on sax. For years, I’ve wished for my own copy of that album.
• Do something messy and nasty. Clean the bathroom, plant seedlings, scrub the floor. Your clean keyboard and cushy chair will be all you’ll dream of while you’re removing mildew or scraping baked-on cheese from a pot.
• Pray. A Rosary or two, meditating on the day’s readings or browsing through the works of good Catholic writers like Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day can bring you blessings tenfold.

When the words begin to flow again, you might have a clean bathroom and a richer spiritual life. Either way, you’ll conquer writer’s block without the agita it can bring. Remember the wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3: “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.” In God’s time, you can defeat writer’s block.