The Block

I can’t seem to write stuff any longer. Ideas are few and far between and when they do appear, attempt­ing to make some­thing come of them is always abortive. There are many pos­si­bil­i­ties that could be caus­ing this. I’ve thought of a few.

Am I writ­ing for myself or oth­ers? Should I be writ­ing for one, the oth­er, both or nei­ther? Is this the wrong ques­tion? Writ­ing for myself means I’ll nev­er write because I find oth­er things more ful­fill­ing. Writ­ing for oth­ers means I need oth­ers to write for, which means I have to decide who to write for. This para­graph makes me feel dirty.

When I do write, it is pret­ty for­mu­la­ic. I sort of think of it as weav­ing. That might put me in a rut though. I think this might have some­thing to do with always try­ing to find the appro­pri­ate con­ceit to write with. Should I always need some sort of con­ceit to write? I can already tell I am putting too many rules and require­ments on try­ing to write stuff. I don’t think it can be done with a check­list.

The stuff I’ve writ­ten that I like best always gets the response ‘i don’t under­stand it, but i like it.’ This destroys me. The stuff I’ve writ­ten that I like best is chock full of ref­er­ences to things, so I guess I assume a cer­tain amount of intel­li­gence in the read­er, or at least enough knowl­edge to under­stand the ref­er­ences. This is at odds with my desire to write things that peo­ple can engage in. My dog­ger­el stuff comes clos­est to this, but it is trite to a great degree. I’ve tried stop­ping the ref­er­ences and I think this might have con­tributed great­ly to my ever deep­en­ing stag­na­tion.

Maybe I should write like chil­dren do. I still thank­ful­ly engage the world like a child and my imag­i­na­tion is quite child­ish. These are good. Maybe I should try to work in a Shel Sil­ver­stein vein.

Maybe I should­n’t write at all. I’m bet­ter at putting things togeth­er than I am at cre­ation. Thus I enjoy film edit­ing, writ­ing poems using ref­er­ences already loaded with mean­ing, and shuf­fling lay­ers of mean­ing and con­no­ta­tion togeth­er in regard to pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al dis­course. I have the mind of an engi­neer, the soul of an artist and not enough dri­ve or direc­tion to suc­ceed at either. I’m pulled, pushed, churned, turned, stretched and squashed in too many direc­tions to be able to effec­tive­ly set­tle on one.

I end­ed many sen­tences in this entry with a prepo­si­tion.

• Also, I don’t think any­one cares whether they read some­thing I write or not. Or feels com­fort­able offer­ing feed­back. So it is hard to find a rea­son to work.