Posted: 04/04/07

Writer's block

Mike Morris | managing editor
mmorris2@smcvt.edu

Funny thing about a weekly publication—it comes out every week. One might think, given the regularity of the deadline, it would be easy to remember each week’s assignment (it’s the same all the time). Nope. Somehow, every Sunday I am struck with the sudden realization that, dammit, I have a column due tomorrow.

This week it hit around 10:30 p.m., which, though my records are spotty, seems to be the latest yet. I figure, with six weeks left, my Sunday realization will start coming Monday morning by the end.

Worse, perhaps, than forgetting about the actual writing of the column until the final minutes is the total lack of ideas I invariably find myself with. Never mind that I live a normal life, one other, better columnists would mine for material. Never mind that friends give me plenty of good ideas. Never mind that some day in the future an analyst will find several indicatitive factors to determine that this entire process is self-imposed.

“Don’t blame it on the parents,” he’ll (or she’ll) say. “Or the children, or lack thereof. Don’t blame it on the peers, the government, the weather, the neighbors or anything.” It’s my fault.

I still can’t find anything to write about.

I’ve resorted to the less-than-clever, oddly post-modern and entirely generic tactic of writing about not writing, and it’s still not working.

In high school, one of my friends turned to D.I.Y. drugs, like nutmeg and cough syrup, to help with his writing. It made him rather prolific, with the novel he was writing stretching to several hundred pages, unfinished and largely unread. Another friend of mine turned to regular drugs, like acid. I can’t say what it did for his writing, but now he seems rather lost.

I tried neither of my friends’ writing aids and saw my writing thus remain unaided.

What the three of us shared, at least as related to writing, was this need to avoid anything challenging, anything that mattered.

Self-imposed? Of course.

The D.I.Y. drug friend didn’t want to write about his break up after a four-year relationship, or any other problems we could only guess at, so he turned to little-known hallucinogens and wrote about abstracted philosophies. The other one took regular drugs and wrote about them, like Kerouac did, but without the courage to leave regular society behind and see what life could offer, without the hope that so colored Kerouac's work, without any sense of purpose to actually guide what he was doing. Lots of kids sat at home and took drugs. He was just one of them.

I’ve got a graduation coming up in six weeks, as mentioned before, and the supposed “real world” to follow it with. In theory, I should have more ideas than ever floating inside my head. In reality, I’m as without them as ever. I write about things like fake Valentine’s Day and my friend getting kicked out of a bar and find it difficult to get even to those.

A friend of mine once described a photographic self-portrait I took as the work of someone who “used humor to cover up other issues.” At the time I thought she made a pretty good point. But now I’ve got more “other issues” and I’m not feeling very funny. Just lost.