Writer's Block

As I set my pen to paper, all that leaks through the ink is that my mind is as blank as the page, and that, if I have nothing to contribute, my energies would be better spent elsewhere. The descriptions do not lie flat, mere words on paper, because there are none there. I would rather write the basest prose, in an elementary style, humble and unassuming, than allow the blank pages to fill my notebook. But, alas, even the simplest thought refuses to find its way to my pen.

My hand hovers above the paper, posed to print a word, any word, and then my attention is caught by something in the environment—someone entering the room, someone speaking, a shifting shadow, anything at all—and my pen abandons words for crude, repetitive drawings of stickmen and geometric figures that build on each other and eventually conquer the page that I had strictly set apart for writing.

One by one, the pages fill up with senseless doodles, sometimes interspersed with fragments of sentences, words or pairs of words that caught my attention as someone else uttered them, but their life ends once they have been penned. They do not stay vibrant, do not attract other words to themselves, do not build into sentences and paragraphs and eventually become stories, short-lived or no. They die and are buried in stacks of notebooks, unmourned because they contributed nothing to the creative process. But perhaps they should be remembered a little more fondly, because those words that flop onto the paper, stagnant and lifeless, are the most inspired words that I have written in weeks.

Pathetic, really, when you think about it.