My Daily Encounter with the Writer’s Block

Lately, I’ve decided to start writing publicly again.

I’ve been dedicating a lot of attention into creating new articles.

As an amateur writer, giving up on this effort is a daily temptation, and following a routine is the only way to prevent it.

If you show up at my house in the morning, you’ll find me on my bed, trying to align a few hundred words on my laptop. It is the first thing I work on, right after chugging a breakfast that often take the form of a simple bowl of cereals.

But, prior to the fun part of typing on the keyboard, I have to deal with the same fear over and over again. Almost every day. Something terrifying called the writer’s block.

The text editor is open and I’m looking at it without an idea of the first word to use. Even my little target of two hundred words written per day seems completely out of reach.

We are all familiar with this emptiness stress, though. Take a few seconds to think about it with me. We encounter similar situations all the time in our lives.

For myself, I vividly remember sitting at a table during school hours, not being able to write a single word on the blank sheet in front of me.

In my professional life (not exactly professional, I’m still in college though), I can’t count the number of times I’ve opened the Text Editor and stayed for minutes or hours staring at it.

Time seems to stop when we are in the middle of scenes like this. And the only way to unlock the clock is to give up, or take the scary first steps towards creating.

That’s the option I pick up every day. I resist the urge to quit, and figuratively limp for a few minutes.

I build improbably poor associations of words and accept that I feel unsure about my goal. Then I relax, forget a bit about the goal and begin to appreciate writing for the sake of it.

Fear and anxiety of the blank sheet give way to the warm feeling of creating something.