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I used to be the kind of writer, who was really, annoying to
any other writer around me. They’d ask how I came up with lines, why I chose
the words I did. How’d you come up with that idea? Where do you find your inspiration?
My answer would be “It’s just there.” I never felt like I made stories up, so
much as they came to me, or I tripped over them and ever so elegantly face
planted right into the middle of what would become my idea of the perfect
story.
Looking back, at every one of those stories, there is the
smallest fragment, like a shard of glass, which comes directly from my personal
life. I think most writers will tell you the same thing, we bleed a little of ourselves
into each creation.
It’s those little shards that the stories grew from; shattering
into a thousand little sparkling pieces of reflection.
I’m a fairly, private person. I don’t wear my life on my sleeve,
or tell it to strangers in the street. Well, not in the way the crying girl at the supermarket will. However,
the last two years have been filled with events leaving me pushing myself away
from those fragments those personal moments. So I still had, the skills I’d
learned, and the craft, voice and style that I’d developed over the years, but
the stories were gone.
Slowly, painfully, they’re starting to come back. They are
starting to grow again. I’ll walk by a conversation in the store, and there
will be a story in the one overheard moment between arguing couples.
The stories never left, they’ve been there, waiting for me
to be ready to start telling them again, to start listening again.
So my take on writers block, has a lot to do with the way we
live our lives. How much time is spent doing what you “dreamed” about when you
were a kid, with all these marvelous ways to communicate with one another, we’ve
gotten lost in a sea of other peoples stories, and distanced ourselves, for personal
reasons, and for other reasons from the things we know.
For now, for me at least, it’s going to come down to write
what you know.
I’ve dusted off the journals, and dug through the notebooks,
to find some of those long forgotten fragments and shards of me.
