On Writer's Block

Writing my way out of my writing funk

Have you ever experienced the frustration of having a whirlwind of ideas and thoughts in your mind, only for them to fade into insignificance when you try to put them on paper? It's as if the act of translating your imagination into tangible words smothers the very essence that made those ideas come alive.

In this musing, I reflect on the limitations of our mind-finger connection and the elusive gap between our taste and our ability to bring our vision to life.

Rather than offering a simple solution to overcome writer's block, I aim to explore the complex interplay between our imagination and the physical act of creation. It is in this exploration that we may find insights, solace, and renewed determination to persist in our creative endeavors.

In yet another bout of productive procrastination, I listened to the Tetragrammaton Podcast with John Mayer, where he very thoughtfully attempts to articulate the torturous wonder that is the creative process. I highly recommend listening to the entirety of the episode, if for no other reason than it’s reassuring to hear a creative of John Mayers caliber also struggles with the same shit we void shouters wrestle with.

Coming off a literary hangover from reading William Gibson’s sci-fi classic Neuromancer, I’ve been stewing on the issues of modernity, and while most of the futuristic world he conjures isn’t something I would hope to see in my lifetime, I would seriously consider having some technology implant that could record all my thoughts as text. I constantly have these inner dialogues and streams of ideas that I want so badly to share and communicate with others, but when I sit down at my keyboard or try to record myself or write them down in a notebook, everything goes silent. The thoughts stop, or they get jumbled in a dense fog of overwhelm. Thoughts that were exploding with energy and excitement seconds ago are diminished to insignificance as I attempt to record them. Rick Rubin has a passage about this phenomenon in his book The Creative Act. He says

“Turning something from an idea

into a reality

can make it seem smaller.

It changes from unearthly to earthly.

The imagination has no limits.

The physical world does.

The work exists in both.”

- Rick Rubin

Allow me to riff on this for a moment. These five sentences get to what, for me, is the very essence of what Steven Pressfield refers to as the war of art. Taking something from your mind where it is limitless, unbound, vivid, and exciting and transferring it to reality. The constraint here seems to be the function or ability of the electrical impulses to travel to our extremities in such a way that they are transmuted in the correct sequence of keystrokes so they capture the essence of these thoughts with some semblance of the fidelity and nuance formed in the imagination. The current state of my mind-finger connection leaves much to be desired. This gap I’m experiencing, Ira Glass explains eloquently in his quote:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal…”

― Ira Glass

In my current moment of despair, the distance between my taste gap, brain, and fingertips feels like a chasm I will never bound. Critical bits and bytes of information wander and are lost in their translation journey, never to be recovered in their same form or sequence again. It's a frustrating and disheartening experience, but the more I study the creative process, I realize this is just part of it.

My conclusion is simply to keep showing up, keep putting words on the page, and keep hitting publish.

I need to remind myself this is an infinite game. To keep playing, I need to persevere with spirited resilience.