You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
writer’s block.
We’ve all heard people say, “I can’t write I have writer’s block.”
I was thinking about that the other day. What is writer’s block?
Is it something physical, like one lineman running into another, pads churning and sweat flying.
Is writer’s block a brick wall you run into head first, your forehead splitting open in a bloody gash of few ideas?
Is writer’s block when you stare at the blinking cursor on this field of white and wonder where the hell is all this going?
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
Like an artist with a pallet full of colors and a canvas before him, is the idea to fill the void with anything or is the idea to fill the space with something memorable?
It depends.
In news, brevelequence is a blessing. Less is more.
“Can you cut that twenty seconds” the irritating producer will say after you’ve struggled to explain quantum physics in 90 seconds.
“Yeah sure. Seventy seconds to explain the theory of Relativity. No problem. Gotta tell people it’s going to rain in Cookeville, right?”
News has taught me to lay it down fast and simple. Words are sausage, just pump them into the sheath and move it down the assembly line, and then make the next sausage.
Every School boy knows that a 5 page paper double spaced means you need to fill the page.
My son has literally written the same paragraph three times in a row attempting to push the words toward the bottom of the typed page.
I look at him and say; “You know if the queen said off with their heads, that’s the same thing as Off with their heads, the queen said.”
He looks at me like I’m crazy because I have uncovered his furtive plan of filling up blank space with nothing.
Speaking of filling up space with nothing.
This morning’s That’s Crazy.™
I would love today’s message to mean something. It should make you laugh or provoke a thought or educate you. I like to think that in some ways THAT’S CRAZY™ is an exclusive diamond waiting to be polished and worn at a fancy ball. But in so many ways this crap I’m churning out is literary sausage.
When the page is blank and the cursor is blinking and the world is waiting to hear my singular CRAZY voice, what then?
Every time I stare at this blank screen I think about you reading. I wonder what you might think, I wonder if I’m wasting your time. I think to myself, am I pontificating to the point of delirium? I wonder to myself; have I said enough? I wonder if I just mailed it in.
And then on that rare occasion, I wonder, do they see the freaking brilliance of that one sentence put together like a single paint brush stroke from Picasso?
Yeah, I just equated my writing on the rarest of occasions to Picasso, so what? It’s my blank page, I can take my words and go home if I want to.
I’m staring at the blank page right now and the interminable field of white before me beckons with ideas that flow beyond the rings of Saturn.
I see colors and words and Ebonics dancing in a jungle full of contractions and dangling participles.
I see so many possibilities, so many thoughts, I can’t get them out of my head fast enough. My brain is a leaking dyke where fire and creativity and inspiration are pouring forth, forcing their way forward, spilling down my arms into fingers that can only type so fast. Some words splash onto the screen, so many other words, and thoughts race past the screen spilling into an empty black hole never to be recaptured.
It’s like a stampede of Crazy. The words in my head are free on a South Dakota prairie. Each idea is a bison racing forward in a pack of a thousand charging animals full of power and unbridled strength. Each word is a hoof,
a million hoofs, clobbering the ground, banging the dry grass of the plains. From the blimp shot in my brain, the stampede appears orderly, moving in a general direction with a sense of consistency.
But from the ground, the process of churning the words into thoughts and into sentences and ultimately usable stories is a dirty labor of confusion.
Each hoof sprays an idea into the air, only to be smashed by another hoof, that sends that idea catapulting randomly through the herd, jacked around with the violence of a Rage Against the Machine Mosh Pit.
Each word, each sentence is like a tiny dirt cloud spraying into the fray, and like so much dust, it floats upward on an atmospheric burp only to settle somewhere on the landscape of non-utilization, long after the collective herd has moved on.
It is with this realization that I think about your message this morning:
POLITICS: Egypt. Camels. Journalists Beaten. Revolution.
SPORTS: Cam Newton. OSU basketball loses. ATT Pebble Beach.
SCIENCE: Asteroid tumbling toward Earth. Car uses air as fuel.
What to write about?
What would Salvador Dali think? Would clocks drip? How about Jules Verne? Would this edition have to go 20,000 leegs under the sea to capture your attention? Would Einstein tell you this story inside an elevator falling through the timeless void of space where gravity did not exist and time could slow down infinitesimally?
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY.
I think today, maybe just my cathartic musings have filled the page. Like my children, I have finished my assigned task. So many words filled so much space on the page. Did, I mail it in? Maybe.
It was a stream of conscious exercise where the only boundary was the black hole from which I gather my inspiration.
Writing is a process. It is laying down the bricks of the story, but unlike a house where every brick looks the same, these bricks are brightly colored shells on the shore of a beach in a far away place. Each shell shimmers with its own frequency, its own resonating pulse.
For me, this place is warm and the sun is always setting. In this place, the trade wind always rustles the palm leaves over my head. There is a bronzed girl in the distance, but her features are obscured by the brilliance of the always setting, pink hue of the sky. In this place, a Corona commercial takes place every second of every day.
So for today, I am grabbing my frosty cold one, having said nothing, but in some ways, saying so much.
Writer’s Block is always better when there is sand between your toes and a lime in a cold Corona.
Happy Friday.
And that is crazy.