Stepping off the Block

[amh1988]

Writers Block.

 Everyone knows what that is, right?

 What about Writers Amnesia?

 

Well, I fell victim to that particular ‘curse’ in September of 2007. I am not even sure how really. I was in the process of writing a short story and stopped typing one night to go to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I simply had no idea what to write.

 I knew what I wanted to say; I had not run out of ideas at all. I simply had no clue how to put them onto the page in a way that would get my thoughts across clearly. And the ‘plot bunnies’ still came in droves; I just could not do anything with them.

 It was not that I did not know what to write, it was that I seemed to have forgotten how.

 In the past, when I ran out of workable ideas, I would scribble out bad poetry until my brain kicked into gear again. But this time, I could not even manage a limerick. I felt that something was definitely wrong with me. In my head, I thought of the words I would use to tell my stories, but when it came time to write them down, those same words deserted me.

 Quite frankly, I began to give up hope that I would ever write anything coherent again. I told myself that the most I could ever put successfully onto paper was the shopping list.

 In what I considered to be a last resort, I went and re-read everything I had ever written before.

 This was a big mistake.

 Reading what I had written previously was different than it had ever been. Before, I read my own stories from the perspective of the person who wrote it. Then suddenly, I was seeing the stories from the point of view of a reader. It had been so long since I read my own work, that I could not recall what I had envisioned at the time.

 I realised that almost everything I had ever written was extremely self-indulgent, and I had never been that good at putting the nuances of my thoughts onto the page. It turned out I was a bad writer.

 I decided it was a good thing that I could no longer spew lengthy and bewildering prose as though victim to some form of literary diarrhoea.

 I still had the urge to write, but I no longer trusted in my ability to do so.

 Then, in January of this year, I was playing around with Microsoft Word and – just playing with fonts – I typed out a sentence. It was not anything profound. It just was just a few words long and contained nothing in the way of creative value.

 I simply wrote:

 

[ Jessica was not fixated. ]

 

 But when I looked at it, I realised that I wanted to explain that sentence to myself. I had only written it to put words on the page, after all. But, I wanted to know why this character thought that way.

 So I wrote a little more. Making it up as I went along to justify her statement. Although, in the end, it turned out that she was fixated, and in denial about it.

 I then realised that I had written a page and a half explaining the thought process of a character to myself. When I looked it over, I was extremely happy with the way in which I had clarified her personality. I had not created her in my mind with a pre-defined persona; she was a blank canvass, as it were. Therefore, when I wrote out her reasoning, I conveyed nuances I hardly even knew were there.

 This ‘Jessica’ was more identifiable than any character I had ever written before, if only because she was less contrived and much more organic.

 In that moment, I had the closest thing to an epiphany I am ever likely to experience.

 The reason I had been bad at describing my characters in depth was simple: I had never really felt like I needed to. After all, I always knew what they were like, and I had the idea of their personalities locked inside my head. I had never needed to explain them to myself.

 I was not rigid, I had always tried to create characters that changed and evolved, but that evolution always happened inside my own head. Consequently, I never really showed them changing slowly on the page. They seemed simply to shift and alter their way of thinking in a rather disconnected fashion.

 Upon learning this, I began to write again. Except, this time, I decided to let my characters evolve at their own pace and in line with the situations I placed them in.

 Like a dam breaking under pressure, the words burst from me and page after page was filled by the words that I had held back for so long. Only, it was different than before; despite my apparent neglect, my skills seemed to have improved.

 I now believe that on the morning I had woken up and did not know how to write what I wanted to say, it was necessary. Some part of my mind was always aware that what I was putting onto the page was not what I was truly trying to convey, and held me back.

 It was only when I was consciously aware of the distinction between writing for yourself, and writing for the sake of understanding yourself, that my abilities evolved.

 And so ended my fifteen month Writers Amnesia.