Death to Smoochy Writer's Block

I used to write. Silly stuff, day-to-day stuff, opinions on important matters, random babbling, poetry and even the occasional short story. I wrote. I wrote all the time. But then something in my head went dry and the ideas, even the most inane of them, stopped coming. I’d sit down and stare at my screen, willing something, anything, to come to me. But nothing ever did.

I might get lucky, and get a paragraph or two out, just like this. Whining expositions about how I wanted to write but couldn’t. Writer’s block. The death of writing. I’d write about that, and then stare at the screen some more. I’d get annoyed with myself for whining, highlight everything and hit delete.

It’s a shame, because once upon a time I think I was pretty good at this kind of thing. Not all the time, maybe not even most of the time, but sometimes I could really hit it out of the park. I could be funny, I could be smart, I could be sentimental, I could even occasionally be deep. And it made me happy. To get the thoughts out there on paper, plop them onto a blog where I knew a few people would read them and be entertained, or given reason to stop and think for a moment about an opinion that differed from their own.

Hell, even getting ridiculous, pointless ideas out of my head and on paper felt good, just because I was still writing.

I’m not going to whine about it anymore. I’m not going to toss up a post saying, “I want to start writing again, but it’s just SO HARD.” I’m done with that, and honestly? I am done with writer’s block. Come hell or high water, I’m going to start writing again.

So, I’m proposing a challenge to myself. I’m going to write something every day for a year. Even if it’s just a couple of sentences, I’m going to shake the dust bunnies out of my head, and get something resembling language out. I’ll use prompts, quotes, pictures, whatever…I’ll find inspiration somewhere. If that doesn’t help kick this case of writer’s block out the window, I really don’t know what will.