Possibly the worst hour of them all to finally break through the wall of bricks that is writers' block is 02:00 on Monday. Mentally, you feel like it's still Sunday, still the weekend. But you know that tomorrow is Monday, and you need sleep so you can drag your sleep-starved carcass out of bed and cover about ten blocks in five minutes to make it to school with plenty of time to experience the first "I fucking hate my life" moment before your first class. But you've just broken the writer's equivalent of the sound barrier, and you don't want to chance allowing the barrier to rebuild itself through your inaction.
So you allot yourself an hour to write, because that is literally all you can spare before you run the risk of falling asleep during the eternally boring movie that the substitute in Brainwashing 405 is being forced to show because she obviously can't be trusted to make the class work on the worksheet the regular teacher assigned the week before. And you make wonderful progress, nearly a thousand words in that short hour! But, alas, it is far too short, and you go to sleep feeling apprehensive, as though you've got a limited amount of time to complete your novel, before the wormhole into genius closes forever. You try to distract yourself by rolling over and brainstorming some situations your characters might be forced into, but that only makes you want to write more. And, worse yet, it makes you want to write scenes that haven't happened yet, and may very well be obsolete by the time they become relevant.
At some point, despite the fact that thinking about your novel and your life only makes you more restless, you manage to drift off into a state of subconscious existence, in which you are vaguely aware of your world and the world of your dreams, and you have control over the events, albeit limited control, in the dreams you won't remember even the smallest bit of in the morning. You wake up at eight and wonder why it is that sleep never seems to last long enough. In the blink of an eye, you have passed five hours, but you don't remember any of it, and only the knowledge that it's morning can convince you that it isn't still three in the morning.
You have twenty minutes of free time, and in your groggy state, you realize something vitally important - you broke the writers' block. After obtaining a cup of coffee and pulling on your clothes for the day, you sit down and proceed to write, caring little for the fact that, because you only have two hands and both of them are in use, your coffee is getting cooler (it's almost cool enough to guzzle now!) and the clock is warning you to slow down with its tick-tocking. But you can't slow down, because the minute you do, you realize that it's 8:22 and you were supposed to initialize the final stages of getting ready for the day an entire two minutes ago! Vainly, you safely remove your jump drive, because if you were to lose the data on it due to laziness, you'd lose your entire life's work, because you haven't made a back-up in a month (which isn't as big of a problem as you make it out to be, since you haven't done a whole lot in a month except watch Star Trek and bide your time until, finally, you're free of the dreaded Phys, Ed. class that has been forced upon you by your school's graduation requirements), and you tuck it into your backpack, thinking, Maybe I'll get a chance to work on my novel today. I need the stupid thing either way, since we're working on the Constant-Downer Projects in seventh.
By the end of the day, the writer's block has healed itself, and you're back to square one. Why? Because life as we know it was not created to accommodate the whim's of the writers' muse. No, it was created by the artless for the artless, artistically crafted in such a way as to fully disrupt the functions of those of us with higher aspirations than working the night shift at Seven-Eleven; those with higher aspirations, even, than the multi-million dollar salaries of J.P. Morgan executives. We were created to ascend to a higher level of esteem, to record the world as it truly is in a way that no history textbook could ever hope to achieve. We embody the thoughts and feelings of the people of our generation, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let the students of tomorrow's literature classes think that the young women of this age lacked the higher brain functions required to think of anything more than attractive males and the prospect of romance. The females of today think of more than just hot guys and how to seduce them; they're obsessed with food, too.
On a more serious note, someday, I will learn how to use Blogger's template designer... thing... and then I'll create my own design, because, really, this one's so generic.
No comments:
Post a Comment