It’s always a tragedy as a writer to be in a moment of weakness: writer’s block. Unironically, writing about writer’s block even becomes difficult to do. From googling writing topics to browsing old work, when in writer’s block it’s hard to get out. Now imagine being a writer and having no energy or imagination to write about anything.
I’ve always heard of the term writer’s block, a period of time when someone can be seen as blocked by a wall, with no way to get around. You want to write desperately, but when you put your fingers on your keyboard or put pen to paper, you literally have nothing to write about.
But what no one ever mentions are the feelings of uselessness and burnout for something you can’t prevent or change. On a personal level, when I went through writer’s block once, I felt so useless that I spent hours googling how to start writing. It got worse when I had to attend my writing and journalism courses, and wanted to make up any excuse to get up and leave in the middle of my lectures. Being surrounded by hundreds of students who could just write with no issue was the true epitome of being the odd one out.
Ultimately, writer’s block is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. You have to contemplate whether you just skip out entirely on trying to write or you write the most horrendous articles that will stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to your previous work.
The “rock” of not doing anything but waiting for your writer’s block to pass sounds effective in hindsight, but ultimately lacks any real help. If you’re like me, a journalism major who also interns in writing positions, simply waiting for this tragedy to pass proves no effective result. Not only do you try to fix the problem on your own, you also just give up on your studies and opportunities to publish work outside of your school. However, the biggest issue with not doing anything is that it will likely take longer for this phase to pass. I’m no expert but I feel that if you just give up instead of trying every day, you’ll realize later on that this phase has passed than if you just do nothing for days, weeks, months, and then out of the blue realize you haven’t written in forever.
But then comes the “hard place” also known as writing work that you may not see as your regular standards. To me at least, when I look back at my terrible work, I cringe at the thought of what time period I was in. So, it’s not like being in a “hard place” is all that glamorous, that is, unless you want to cringe at your odd ideas and even odder published articles.
Ultimately, writer’s block is everything you’d imagine it to be. It’s a terrible, horrible, no-good feeling. A feeling you want to get rid of immediately but find extremely hard to do.