Writer’s Bloc, Or Is It “Block”?

[Shana A]

Writer's Bloc, Or Is It "Block"?
Posted September 24, 2008

http://radnichole.wordpress.com/2008/09/24/writers-bloc-or-is-it-block/

I have an essay in mind. In fact, it's in heart, probably even soul; but I cannot write it today. Just one of those things. An experience occurs and one wishes to lay it "all out there" because it might click with someone else. But.

Yes, "but". "But" one also knows that the power, the emotion, the concern she will not get it right, not that it would be wrong, "but" just too much, too soon, hangs like a vulture over the process of placing words in formations that will be both understandable to others and worth the writing for herself.

Maybe not so much writer's block as just a writer blocked by herself from writing about her own heart, her own experience. What does one give? How much is too much and how much isn't quite enough? How many will read and come away with the exactly opposite feeling than she wanted to convey? *sigh*

[Sephirah]

What a brilliant essay.

I can't tell you how much I relate to what you said there, Nikki. But... you have a rare gift in that you make the writing look effortless. It takes me quite a while to form what I want to say into the right way I want to say it... and the two aren't always compatible.

Thank you for writing that.

[NicholeW.]

Thank you, Leia. It's never effortless, ever. You just have to wrap your mind around this basic fact: your writing is very like your farts, they smell not so bad to you as they do to another.

So, you fart alone and then present the world with a finished article, yourself, all pristine and clean and perfumed, not the makings of a finished article.

Nikki

[NicholeW.]

Poetry takes a helluva lot of work, Scarborough. To distill an emotion ot thought into powerful language and rhythm, sound and  sense is not just spalshing words across a page as one might finger-paint when young.

The essence of the poem is the lyric -- everything that word holds -- and takes time and practice, a good sense of sound, a good sense of sense. It's not a matter of simply scribbling down what's on my mind. That's a letter, not a poem or crafted prose. 

Nor is good prose simply scribbling. There are rules and methods that require a certain amount of refinement or no one will read what another has to say, bother to read it, at least not more than once or twice. There's an art to making a paragraph flow rather than simply placing a huge block of type on a screen.

It takes time and practice. Being literate is not the same as being able to write well.

Thanks for the compliment. I surely appreciate that.

Nikki