Terror Week Day Three: Writing is the Best Cure for Writer's Block

My mentor believed that poetry and verse were entirely different things. He saw poetry as inspiration set down on paper from the highest point of your creative instinct. Verse was the technical, soulless version you created with your rational mind.

This distinction matters because it insists you can write no matter how uninspired you feel. You can produce the mechanics of the work without feeling them in your soul.

I write every day. If I can’t produce inspiration, I produce mechanics. It’s not that I need the writing. I have plenty of that. I keep a daily schedule because trying to produce masterful writing is like trying to have an orgasm. The more you wish for it, the more elusive it becomes. The less I write, the more I stew in my writer’s block, and the more I stew, the worse my writing becomes.

Daily writing is how I overcome my fear of drying up. It turns my frustration into regular action. When I produce the mechanics, my muse is more likely to arrive because I’m not trying to have an orgasm. I’m visiting my empty page, and that’s the only place muses ever visit.

If I write from an uninspired place, I will almost always produce deeply flawed work. This, I’ve learned, is worthwhile. It always leads to inspired work eventually. I’m okay with producing abject crap, and you should become okay with it, too. I’m not saying you should share that flawed work. Getting an annihilating critique does little for your fear, but write crap anyway. Set it aside. Maybe next week you’ll revisit the work and take something worthwhile out of it as a prompt.

I will tell you this a thousand times: It can take years for the right conditions for a poem to coexist, but how will you know they’ve intersected until you put the words down?

My muse is Nike Swish: Just do it. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. Either way, you wrote something, and by doing so, you gave your fear fewer rungs to climb.