Writer’s bunk – a chip off the old writer’s block

 

Some would call it writer’s block. Me, I call it procrastination.

I tried to write, I really did. I started to write several different things but none of them seemed to take off. So, I snapped the laptop shut, as if that was going to solve all my problems.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. For one, I write but that does not make me a writer, and secondly I don’t suffer a ‘block’ –  I suffer from a short attention span. Often, a great idea, turns into a good idea and then suddenly I’m not typing away furiously any more, I’m thinking up a temporary title, because already I’ve decided I can press ‘save’ and do more work on it tomorrow. And that’s how it works. Most of the time.

There are times, and it must be said if I ever turned professional there would be more of them, where I skive. Blatant skiving. Like seeing how many different iterations of Batman I can get on Amazon prime, or taking selfies of myself wearing my girlfriend’s wig. Sometimes I’ll organise the books on my shelf in order of height, or find myself worryingly pre-occupied by how many spare light bulbs I don’t have in my utility drawer. This is not the block suffered by a writer. This is the cutting torment of a hack.

Today the words flow from my fingers like water from a tap. Tomorrow, it’ll be like trying to push Stonehenge through a mouse hole. It’s just the nature of the beast, I guess, but if the beast could encourage me not to worry about whether or not I should make space for the desk fan in the cupboard, or make re-positioning the microwave slightly less vital during the rare occasion I have time to write, well, that’d be kinda swell.

 

It’s skiving, Jim but not as we know it!

 

Copyright Martin Gregory. 2018

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