Writer’s Block Isn’t Real

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

I was sitting in a creative writing seminar at my University. We sat in a circle, as all liberal arts students should. A circle, it turns out, makes it easier to discuss things. Makes the students feel as if they are all on the same level. Makes not taking the same seat everyday somewhat easier. Makes not ogling someone across the room damn near impossible.

We were discussing writer’s block: what it was (a terrifying inability to write, as if being frozen) and how to overcome it (keep writing). I’ve been writing since I was 12, and reading since I could. My parents were ahead of the curve and I was a fairly good reader by the time I hit kindergarten, where I was disappointed to find that the curriculum was mostly built around teaching us our letters. Words are my “love language,” and they have been for a long time. I used to write poems in my room in a sad little spiral bound notebook. Sometimes I wrote poems I thought were good and sometimes I wrote shit. But, I figured out fairly early that I just had to keep on writing.

It is a discouraging thing to know what good writing looks like. To know the incantations of beautiful prose or to recognize the profundity in a poem or story, but to be unable to replicate beauty or profundity in one’s own work. It is discouraging but also incredibly exciting to…