THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS GREAT MYTH

WRITER'S BLOCK!  I personally believe that these two words are the biggest lie ever told by writer.  This lie also goes a long way toward promoting the idea that only a "professional writer" can create the mystical magical creature called a BOOK.  What a bunch of BS!  You can teach a monkey to beat on a keyboard for 80,000 to 100,000 words then put it in print and call it a book.  If you don't believe me take a look at some of the books for sale on Kindle!  I would be embarrassed to lose my Kindle and have someone find it and look at my library if I even downloaded most of that garbage.  I digress.  Now don't get me wrong, ours is a noble profession and I certainly do believe many authors do create real magic.  Unlike magic, good writing is rarely a hit and miss event that is punctuated by months of sitting in a cold garret wearing fingerless gloves and putting precious shovels of coal in a tiny hearth while all our friends and neighbors are in Aspen singing "Rocky Mountain High" and sipping too many cups of hot mulled wine. I also believe that the greatest magic is the mastery of the written English language.  To paraphrase an old saying, "You can either dazzle them with your skills and knowledge of the English language, or you can baffle them with your Bull S___"  I believe that 99.9% of WRITER'S BLOCK is pure lack of learnable skills that used to be taught in every elementary school classroom in this country.

WRITER'S BLOCK is easily cured by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair and posing the hands attached to the end of your arms to the keyboard of your computer.  Yes, I have had moments of sitting there looking at the screen then looking at my hands then looking back at the screen and trying to decide if I wanted to write or iron all my summer clothes even though there is three feet of snow on the ground outside.  Sometimes I am absolutely sure that next week I will meet the rich man I have always dreamed about and he will buy me the world and take away all my need to support myself by wearing out the little black keys on my computer.  I will then buy an IPAD and knit my way across the Gobi Desert on a slow train while reading all the classics I loved so much as a child. 

WHOOOO, just wait a minute now.  The truth is I don't write mainly for either money or as a way to support myself and I will retire in less than two years so that excuse will not work either.  One of these days I am going to make a list of all the reasons not to be a writer.  This would be a great exercise to do the next time you have WRITER'S BLOCK.  My whole point in all this nonsense is..there is no such thing as WRITERS BLOCK.  If you have it just start typing on your keyboard.  Make a grocery list, make a list of all the things you love/hate about your mother-in-law, make a list of all the extinct animals you know of, write an essay and describe what it would feel like to have orange skin with green polka dots and, fuchsia fir where most people have hair.  Another words, for pete sake get over yourself and just DO IT!

Who knows, you could write the next million seller on the Kindle 99 cent booklist.