Writer's Block

Lately I’ve spent my blogging time sitting around with the laptop on my, er, lap and engaging in light mental exercises* to get the creative juices flowing. Although I’ve a wealth of topics, events, experiences, and even opinions to share with anyone who stumbles across this site, there are times when I just can’t seem to artistically arrange my native phonetic syllabary and accompanying intellectual lexicon into a perspicacious, provocative, or even facetious manner no matter how assiduously I try.

Okay, so I spent entirely too much time composing that last sentence, utilizing dictionary.com in doing so. Who uses a word like perspicacious in normal conversation anyway? Not anyone I know. Not even me, because I’ll probably forget its meaning in the next ten minutes. As it is, I’m just trying to remember the Japanese word for “fun” so I don’t have to go diving for my dictionary every time I want to use it in an unscripted dialogue with friends.

But really, I feel like my writing has been rather lack-luster of late, and being the perfectionist I am, if I’m not satisfied with the finished product, I refrain from posting it. Sometimes it doesn’t sound quite right. At other times, I don’t get any further than a lot of incomplete sentences documenting the topic. While this usually provides fodder for fleshing out the post, lately I’ve been having trouble bringing it together in a way that won’t bore everyone, including myself, to tears.

Believe it or not, there’s a bright side to all of this. In mounting desperation, I began looking at my ever-increasing array of unfinished posts for something to spark the fire. You see, although I much prefer to write and post on a topic in one sitting, I somehow formed this habit of writing in stages- going back to a particular piece of work multiple times in the span of a week or more. Taking a break can be refreshing, and it’s better to come back to a post I’d been at a loss at how to finish two days ago and complete it in fifteen minutes versus the hour and a half I would spend dredging my brain on ways to progress.

Can you guess what I found?

Yep, some almost completed posts that I can easily wrap-up. Hurrah! So the next few posts will probably be dealing with topics that were current, oh, a few months ago. Hopefully they’ll still be interesting to you AND help propel me out of my writing funk…

Better late than never, right?

*After intense research & experimentation, I have concluded that staring at the white-washed wall across the room in front of you while shifting your weight occasionally because different areas of your body are going numb does not and should never be constituted as “light mental exercise”.