Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

I sit hunched before the computer’s blank screen and staring back at me is the huge, dreaded writer’s block. And as I sit with a blank face, my son with his wit, especially reserved for me when I slip at times, says “Eh! Writer’s block? Why don’t you then write about writer’s block?” 

“Why not? Smart aleck”, that is exactly what I am not able to do _ Write!.” Words just fail me.

Some would, of course, break it down to plain laziness, but that does not quite solve the issue. 

It is a  huge unsolvable cube and sits firm on doing what it does _ Block. The only way, I feel, is to throw a lasso over the block and hope it anchors on to an idea for me to haul me over. All the lasso does is caress a floating cloud of words that float by. Random words, and mostly without a soul, giving me not much to weave into. Maybe if it was a sphere, or a cylinder or even a triangle, I probably might find some way to slip past, but it is a whole huge big block and any way around it seems non-existent.

One way is to not acknowledge it. But then the thing-which-shall-not-be-named is not into onomastics and calling it or not calling it by any name does not make it any less harsher.

My mind, which otherwise is an open workshop, where ideas, schemes and designs gambol, is now eerily quiet. And it certainly isn’t the profound quietness that sages prefer.  Have all the ideas shut shop, given that most of the kids, this time of the year, are lost in the yearly tamasha called exams?. Is it some hidden physiological fear of exams that’s bothering me? I hardly think so for, if anything, these were the times when I always had been ultra creative. It is a different matter that my teachers, dogmatic that they were, never gave me any credit for it.

I have at times such as these sought out other writers and probed as to how they overcome the tough times. And I have invariably, without fail, been offered a cliché. A cliché so clichéd that it out-clichés every other cliché!   “Just write…, Just leave it…., go for a walk…, listen to songs…, sing…, dance…, read…, sleep on it…, no it is not real…,” so on and so forth.

That’s when I hit upon the solution. It is still at an experimental stage, with many hits and misses and there isn’t enough data to postulate it as a theory. A Solution Magical? maybe not, but it has a bit of voodooishness quality about it. Next time you are thwarted by a writer’s block, ask another writer how to deal with it. The suggestions and answers are immaterial, you have just allowed the block to shift away from you and cling on to a new source. Now that you are in the clear, go ahead and write.  And what if someone asks you the very question. Run, just run. Afterall, you want to write, right?