The wall

Occasionally I find myself stuck.  Feet in the mud, hands pressed against the glass I struggle to go farther than I have already travelled.  Some call it 'writer's block', others call it 'hitting the wall'; I call it floundering.

It is not, for me, that I cannot physically surmount the obstacle before me and it is not that the answer is the other side of said hurdle.  Rarely have I climbed the wall and the next chapter presented itself tapping it's watch asking what took me so long.  More often than not the answer will not simply arise, the wall does not merely crumble.  The continuation of the plot is a process of logic, articulation and emotion (probably in that order) and, therefore, relies on writing a small progression, editing, writing further, editing, and then the obstacle is removed and the story flows more freely.

It is this process of trying to pluck a path out of thin air that reminds me more of a fish out of water than a climber at the foot of Everest; after all, is a fish out of water not the same as a writer that cannot write?

However briefly these incidences occur, they scare me.  As with anything remotely resembling a talent one worries that it may not last forever; golfers lose their stroke, sprinters wane on their pace and comedians stop being perceived as funny.  Could this happen to me?  Will I wake up one day and find I can no longer write?

Of course there is always the chance that one of life's many unpleasantries may arise that render a full inability to form letters upon a page but the idea that, for no apparent rhyme nor reason, one's ability to craft an engaging and liberating story could cease to exist.  This scares me a lot.

To me writing is not only the ability to escape into a world that can never truly exist but it is also a way to bring something new into the world.  Short of creating children this is my only way of doing so and to lose the ability to create, to carve characters from nothing, hew worlds together from a mere thought, would be devastating.

That is why I flounder.  I would rather continue to write, as disjointed and painful as it may be at the time, and write only twenty words than stop in the fear that I may never even manage those twenty.  After all, one can always revisit those painful twenty words and sculpt them into something more tantalising at a more appropriate time.

Stay safe,

Jensen Carter