on writing (V)

The bane of my existence? Writer's Block. Ashley's noticed a trend: I will go weeks without writing anything, stumbling over every word, my fingers hovering over the keyboard, and then, as if a switch is flipped, I hammer out fifteen, twenty, thirty pages in a series of days. I go from being unable to write a decent sentence to being unable to stop writing decent sentences. "If only I could bottle this inspiration..." 

But if we're being honest, Writer's Block is often used as a short-hand for laziness. I'm guilty of it. There are times when I go to The Anchor for a couple hours of writing and I end up spending the entire time reading articles online. While much of it may be due to laziness, I don't think that's always the case: sometimes the muse slips out for a while. Writers' Workshops have all sorts of homeopathic remedies for the dreaded Block, but what works best is pretty simple: as the picture says, Keep calm and write something. Having reached a Block in my current writing project, I gritted my teeth and just kept on writing, even when I was unhappy with the product. Of course, I kept going back over it, rewriting and revising time and again to get it looking somewhat professional. 

A few days ago Ashley and I sat down on the sofa when the girls were in the playroom and I read her fifteen pages of what I'd written in the midst of my Writer's Block, seeking her input. Ashley knows I value honesty, and more than once she's told me she doesn't like a scene, or a passage, and she tells me why. I know I can trust her, because she knows how important it is to me to hear what she really thinks. Her response to those fifteen pages? "I don't know what you mean by Writer's Block, because all of that sounds fantastic! You really capture the panic, the hurried atmosphere, the tension of the moment. It literally kept me on the edge of my seat. There were points where my heart-rate even accelerated, and that never happens to me when I'm reading a story!" Her words were encouraging, but I can't take all the credit: Mozart certainly helped.

Scientists have determined that listening to Mozart increases creativity.

(True story: look it up)

They're not really sure why this is the case, but it's shown to be the case.

Thus I have been listening to lots of Mozart lately.

Here's The Marriage of Figaro. Definitely worth a listen!