The problem with having writer's block, in my life at least, wasn't the writer's block itself. The problem was that because of the writer's block, anything I wrote was so hard-won that it became like divine writ. "Every comma is sacred; not a word can be changed!" seemed to be my thinking. Anyway, it was my behavior. So I would bang out a page, or ten pages, or 20 pages, and parts of the piece would be very good. And parts would be less good. And I just couldn't bring myself to fix the less good parts, and eventually the struggle to get the stuff out of my head just didn't seem worth it anymore.
Writer's block broke recently, only a couple of weeks ago in fact. I'm not pretending that anything in this blog is Art, or of a quality that could be published for money. Frankly, I'm just having a good time. But I knew that the light at the end of the tunnel was something other than an oncoming train as of last fall. That was when I suddenly rediscovered the ability to edit my own stuff. My writing was no longer anything like holy writ; it was just a bunch of words on a screen. And I suddenly had the facility just to move this sentence from here to there, or make a verse scan better, or take out one or another of my pompous catchwords.
None of this means that a novel will eventually be spit out, or even decent stories or worthwhile poetry. It just means that whatever does get spit out will probably be better by the time you read it here than it was when I first conceived of it. And if anything here turns out to be interesting to anyone other than the guy living in my skull, I can polish it up and make it better still. All of which is a major improvement over the old days of agonizing over every comma and semi-colon. And some of the words, too.
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