Writers Block. No Silver Bullet.

“Just give me one sentence I can be proud of Godamit!”

Writer’s block is a curse.

The symptoms of this curse are not pretty.  They include…

Despair:  Creativity seems to walk hand in hand with emotional pain.  We are pregnant with ideas but we lack what it takes to birth them, which creates a log-jam in the body.  We then tend to blame our misery on a shortage of skill, resources or appropriate drugs.

Craziness:  Writers don’t have status envy or shoe envy – we have sentence envy.  After writing something good, we read something brilliant, then the sheer injustice of it all causes us to howl at the moon.

In fact, just like werewolves, we have a dual nature.  Most of the time we are civilized, rational beings, but occasionally some other aspect of our ‘self’ shows up.  We usually subdue this, as we know we cannot control it.

But what if the reverse is true?  What if the small part we cannot control is our authentic self and the larger civilized self is just a mask?

And what if the part we cannot control contains all the energy to make our creative dreams come true?

Breaking the spell of writer’s block requires us to go beyond the comfort zone of “doing” and into the creative realm of “being”.  It involves a metamorphosis from the roles of our personality to the authenticity of our soul.

Our “doing” self is hard wired to seek approval so has constructed a barricade of patterns, learned behaviors and beliefs, in order to fit in.  It plays a set number of clearly defined roles.

Our “being” soul doesn’t need approval.  It is authentic, so is not plagued by self-doubt or the fear of humiliation.  It is comfortable with the random nature of chaos, so is free to play with infinite possibilities.

Look at the blank page and ask yourself a question.

Who is writing?

Then open the cage, smile at the moon and put away that silver bullet.