Flat # 000, Writers’ Block

The last 2 months were very hectic from the point of view of the last 2 months!

My friends started questioning me why I am not writing in my blog (which means I have started bothering them more).

Beyond the business reasons, I too started wondering didn’t I find an hour to torment my creativity of sorts?

Then it dawned on me – all of us go thru this period of “don’t know what I did in the last summer or winter or wherever the last 2 months fell”, though it sounds a bit of a complicated period going by the narration. If my memory serves right and left, learned men and women call it writer’s block. I am not sure how this happens to even those who are not writers like the underdigitallysigned.

I heard different popular writers had their methods to counter this period of creativitylessness.

Rowling used to slap the tea shop owner once a while where she normally frequents for her Potter stories. The guilt and probably the tea shop owner’s return guilt made her work vigorously on the witches and the other horrifying set of creatures she comes up with. PG Wo tries to slip on his 4 little stairs and takes some deliberate extra rolls to get wet or dirty depending on the season to jump back to the writing table. Jeffrey Archer prefers to go to jail to start writing again. I heard he has a bunch of tax experts to work on cooking the defaults that will fetch him the “Yes Milad. I plead guilty for all. Now can I go to my cell?” opportunity. Tamil writer Sujatha used to dismantle his old computer completely and refixes it during these tough times. People say he adds a new feature to it every time he refixes and by the time he died, made it almost a living thing.

But I know a few guys who will never get this disease. I have a friend who only thinks in numbers and rarely in words. Having got used so much to Excel worksheets for countless number of years – even his signature by hand looks digital. For any communication in life, he will draw some rows and columns and try to accommodate all he wants to say within those. I used to wonder what happens if he is under the gun and asked to write a novel. I guess the digital novel will go like this:

	The	Night	that	never	dawned
	Lisa	David	Maria	George	Gardener	Driver
Page 1-38	Intro and her father’s murder				Comes once to mow to find the father’s corpse	Waits for instructions in the car doing nothing
Page 39-89		Meets Maria CNTRL C	CTRL V			Prime suspect
Page 90-224	Meets David CNTRL C	CTRL V Falls in love with Maria and both meet very often (since 130 pages)	Escapes from an unidentified killer narrowly		Comes to get the money for the mowing and the unrelated job	Drops and picks up lot of guests for the funeral
Page 225&226	Goes to Police
Page 227 - 342	Keeps crying	Gets murdered		Falls in love with Lisa and both meet very often (since 120 pages)
Page 343	Cries and Smiles alternatively		Catches George	Gets caught - happens to be the murderer		Silently drives both Lisa and Maria

There is another friend who has practiced a life of absolute silence carefully combined with complete thoughtlessness. Most of his answers will be – eh? Oh! Ah.. mmm. He has always behaved like a crashed hard drive with no answer for any type of communication. Imagine he starts writing his blog:

: eh?

darkness

: oh!

silence

: ah?

By the way, I have had Employee's block for so many years in the Gulf and no one tried to cure me luckily. I know a few friends who have had Student's block and never bothered to come out of it.

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