Yzabel / August 16, 2005

I used to believe that when I couldn’t write, I should just give up and go do something else. After a few years of working as a technical writer, I’ve however come to realize quickly that this is all well and good when you don’t write professionnally, or at least when you don’t have deadlines, but not in other circumstances. When a manual is due on a certain day, my boss doesn’t want to hear “I have writer’s block, I can’t write” (technical documents are never inspiring to me anyway, so this is a constant problem). What boss, come to think of it, would accept to hear an employee say “I’m not inspired today, I can’t answer the phone/type your letters/repair this database”?Answer: not even one.Since then, I’ve understood that the writer’s block, when it happens, is something I just need to swallow and do with. There are moments when doing something else for half a hour or a few minutes only will indeed trigger “inspiration” again, and some others when all of this is vain. In the latter case, I now try to force myself to write. Not necessarily on the problematic text, not necessarily aiming at perfect writing… just doing it. In a way, it’s like sports: I’ll moan that it’s hard and that I can’t make the effort, but after ten minutes lifting weights or running, things flow by themselves (well, for me, at least!).And then, what about writing? It won’t be the greatest prose ever written, it may seem like a waste of time, yet in the end, at least I’ve done something, and not procrastinated while whining about how hard it is to find inspiration. To be honest, I’m also trying to adapt this to drawing, telling myself that in the worst case scenario, I’ll have a few sketches that I can perhaps use later, in different circumstances.See, I wasn’t even inspired to write any post in this blog today, and what is now on this page? The idea just needed to be triggered.I wonder how other writers tend to react to this dreaded anxiety of the block. Do they stop writing? Do they go on, like I do, even if knowing they’ll have to perform severe editing the day after to compensate for the lack of ideas/inspiration? Anything else?Surely there isn’t one universal solution to this… or is there?inspiration, writing