Saturday Evening Writer's Block

Sometimes a Saturday will wear on. I’ll become bored. The grass is cut, the house is clean (relatively), and the dishes are washed. I’ll find myself with nothing much to do on a Saturday afternoon, ticking down the days until college football returns. So in that time, I’ll begin going through old papers. A few months back I found what amounted to a treasure trove of teenage-and-early-twenties-Blake artifacts. There were drawing pads with so many drawings of Dragon Ball Z characters that it would make your head spin. And I was pretty good at that. There were pre-printed tablature sheets where I wrote out some of the most horrid guitar riffs known to man, all in an effort to emulate guitarists that I was nowhere near as talented as…and then there were the notebooks.

Page after page of things I had written when I was younger. The science fiction stories I would write, emulating Star Wars. The detective stories I would write, emulating The X-Files. I found them all. I found poems and short stories I had written as part of a class project from my earliest collegiate days. And I also found a solitary little sheet of paper. The corner was torn off. It was slightly yellowed from some time spent in the sun. There was a thin patina of dust on it. It had been folded for God only knows how long, and I was hesitant to unfold it too quickly, fearing it might fall apart.

Written on this page was a single paragraph. It wasn’t really structured. It wasn’t a poem. It looked like a young version of me aiming for a high philosophy. It read (no grammatical changes):

“This piece of paper has infinite depth. It is a plane eight inches by eleven inches. It is flat, yet forever deep. It’s depth changes with the writer. It is the writer that determines infinity, depth, the shallow, and the wide. This piece of paper has infinite depth.”

For a long time, I fancied myself a writer. I’ve always loved sitting down with a pen and paper, and later on, a computer, and a blank slate before me. I grew up in a relatively rural setting. My closest friend was several miles away. This was during a time where it was a long-distance phone call for me to call a friend who lived ten miles away. I’m not exaggerating; we lived in the sticks. I had video games, but I wasn’t exactly wrapped up in them nonstop.

So I wrote. I would lay on the floor in my room, fire up the radio, and write stories emulating the style of The X-Files, though I would always try to inject more humor than the show had. As my interests changed from X-Files to harder science fiction, I started writing stories about space fighter pilots. Yeah, it was a rip-off of Star Wars. But, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I continued on.

I would listen to CDs, I would listen to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 and whatever other radio stations I could find on my little radio. To this day, I still write while listening to music. While I try not to let the music dictate my writing pace, I do let it influence the substance of my writing.

But lately I’ve discovered something…with the exception of blog posts, which are usually about sports, I’ve not been able to churn out any good creative writing. I would sit down to write, and instead of working my way to a writer’s block, I was already on one. I would sit back and think, I would change my music, I’d get something to eat, but nothing broke the dam, as it were.

After several unsuccessful tries and various false starts, I spoke with an old high-school friend of mine, Frank. It turns out Frank was going through a similar dry spell. We began comparing notes, as it were, and we stumbled upon a few things.

Frank is married; I’m single – so that’s not a good comparison.

Frank works as a writer for a newspaper; I work as a writer for a military satellite communications company – again, a similarity, but not enough similarity to warrant a closer inspection.

Then, we found it: Frank had recently bought a house; I had recently bought a house – Bingo!

We discussed the situation of buying a house and realized that there was something about placing yourself in debt to something for thirty years or better that sobers you from a writing perspective. It saps so much creative energy from you that it can take years to refill those reserves. I can only assume those reserves will refill, that is.

After all, Hemingway, Faulkner, King, and various other writers all wrote their best work after the age of 35. I’m not even there yet. (I’m also not comparing myself to Hemingway, Faulkner, and King.)