Start Writing
-Jonathan Marasco

If you’re reading this, I’ve returned.

I generally think of writer’s block as a pervasive blanking that sets upon me as I stare at an empty page or flashing cursor. Its aim, I imagine, is to sever the connection between my creative flow and my writing, and to achieve this it takes various forms – a distraction, or a sudden desire to delete things I’ve written, or simply a feeling like a soft breeze that erases my creative impulse like snow drifting over a trail.

The writer’s block I’ve experienced lately, however, is of a different sort. It’s been chronic – the kind that doesn’t just interrupt a train of thought or even drive me to shelve a project I’ve been working on, but that targets my creative expression itself, and convinces me to shelve even that. Until now, the last time I sat down to write creatively, for no other purpose than to express and challenge myself, was five years five months ago – and that itself was a furious exercise to delay the slow atrophy that had already begun.

Without the external motivation of college courses or talented writers around me, I had lost track of the joy of putting life to words, and crafting descriptions and expressions that read like music. A professor of mine taught me to write down everything – thoughts, experiences, descriptions, observations. I was doing this for a little while (a very little while) on paper, then I was doing it in my head. Then I didn’t have time to do it in my head, and then I forgot I should even be doing it. And of course there were the time constraints that set in.

The shift in priorities I began to experience kicked creativity down the list of useful ways to spend my time, as I found practicalities becoming more pressing. It was a general squeezing of the creative stream whose now-shrunken channel runs from my eyes, ears and other senses through my heart and to my mind, from which it takes its form through word choices, sentence structure and inventive expression.

I don’t consider myself a writer by any means, in that I don’t write for a living, or even write to be published. But I can’t deny that I am a writer, in that I see things, and connections are made, and words come. And lately to me this has become worth fighting for again.

I used to imagine as I journaled that one day I would be such a well-respected writer that someone – perhaps my children – would find my journals and publish them, to show the world how I got my start. And mostly the entries I wrote with all this in mind turned out sounding flowery or pretentious. But here’s what’s been missing for five and a half years: sit down and do it. And however I’ve come to it this time, here I am. Sitting and doing. There is a freedom I think in writing that I haven’t yet embraced: the freedom to write what’s on my mind without being tied to form or audience.

These two seem to hold me back often. I restrain or edit myself for their sakes rather than writing freely, and mastering the craft. I feel confident that inside me are many stories waiting for shape, and many internalizations of observation and experience waiting to see creation and expression. It’s that cap at the top of my creativity, like a hinged valve that lets just a little out and then clamps down and switches the stream over to self-criticism and extensive editing and reworking. And if this writer’s block has made self-criticism my worst enemy, I’ve got to stand against it whenever the valve flips.

It starts when I stop my pen, and my eyes drift away while I pause. Then I see what I’ve written, and I begin rethinking it. So then I’ve got to start with my eyes (because surely it’s unreasonable to expect my pen never to stop, unless I plan to write Ulysses’ sequel). If my eyes stay away from my writing, I can begin to exercise the suppressed muscles of persistence – standing in the blank space on the page and pushing ahead in my mind; stimulating my thoughts to find new words and new directions. This could be one exercise.

Here’s another – forming my sentences on the page, not in my head. The valve redirects the creative flow from my pen on the page to my head, where the critic can easily step in and strike words before they’re even written. But to use my mind for creative direction, finding thoughts and ideas and subjects, and my pen for making the sentences, I bet will allow me to become comfortable with my own voice – and it will be my voice, not a scripted or well-refined expression of my voice. I don’t expect it therefore to be unrefined, but refined through using it, not thinking about it.