Conquering Writer’s Mountain

melaniegin
I’m sure many of you have gotten writer’s block, but what I have feels more like writer’s mountain. Insurmountable, undefeatable, horrible, writer’s mountain. It is so frustrating to watch my blog languish in inactivity for weeks at a time, or to generate ideas that never get converted to stories. I’m trying, but it seems that every idea out of my head is, after a few sentences, little more than space used up on my computer, never to see the light of day. 

I didn’t always have to battle for my ideas to leave the drawing board. In fact, last quarter, I felt like a real writer. In between classes, I’d race to the library to pound out a quick piece, or jot down ideas in the margins of my newspapers. Ideas would just hit me while walking down Bruin Walk or in my classes, and I would simply try to remember everything. Writing was fun, not stressful, and I easily could post the one entry a week I committed myself to at the beginning of starting my blog. 

Generally, writing goes something like this: idea pops into my head (!), I jot it down, come back, type furiously for a couple of hours, and bam! The story is done. 

Now, however, I feel momentarily defeated by words. I’ve begun so many sentences only to hold down the delete button to erase everything. It’s so frustrating! While I can still generate ideas, I have trouble sparking the electricity in my head that drives the piece home. Instead, I meander between different arguments, stopping to brush my hair or check my emails, and I soon become unhappy with the story idea in general and its lack of progress. Stories quickly get delegated to my “to-do” list, which receives bare-bones attention and is pretty much abandoned. 

Why am I facing this writer’s mountain? I’ve asked myself this numerous times in the past weeks, and I think it has to do with me constantly comparing my old pieces to my new ones. With my prior writings on my blog as clear evidence of what’s come before, I feel obligated to come up with something inventive and serious and quirky all at once. This pressure leaves me unable to write anything.   

I must stop setting myself up to fail by criticizing everything I do: stories written imperfectly will need to be enough. If not, I am going to continue driving myself crazy. Words will stagnate in my head, I’ll keep punching myself for fun, and hours of time will be wasted simply because I can’t write more than two sentences on any given idea. I want to overcome the walls in my head stopping my fingers from typing with confidence. I want to stop criticizing myself so much, to stop asking the impossible. 

Melanie, it is okay to post something imperfect. It is okay to have fun with this blog. It is okay to not know how you feel about something, or to not research every minute detail, or to be silly. 

Let this start the outpouring of words. 
Conquering Writer’s Mountain