A chip off the old writer’s block

Time to panic. My turn to write the column, but my brain has taken advantage of the long weekend and gone somewhere nice and chilly, leaving the rest of me to swelter in the city heat. It’s too late to SOS my writing partner, who’s probably off somewhere either cooling his heels or comfortably baking in the sun (some people are just blessed with heat-resistant, flame retardant, industrial-strength hides that don’t absorb UV rays — umm, kidding!). So I’m left to fend for myself.

I always know that a bad case of writer’s block is in the offing, much like the dull throbbing in the back of your head that presages an excruciating migraine. And this evening, as the deadline looms near, this particular attack is unusually intense — not only am I burning holes in my lungs as I go through one poison stick after another, but my stomach is doing enough somersaults to put the best Cirque du Soleil acrobat to shame.

One of those quick-fix writer’s block bypasses is to relax and walk it off, which I attempted to do earlier today while trying to escape from the stifling heat. Problem is, I chose an erstwhile unexplored Cainta mall to walk in, which did more harm (to my budget anyway) than good. A few hours of people-watching would have helped somewhat, but I was too busy checking out the sales to do anything remotely productive. So here I remain, suffering from buyer’s remorse and hopelessly stuck.

Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw has it made: she never seems to run out of stuff to write about (it probably helps to have a team of writers to back her up). What’s more, she never runs out of strange stuff to write about. But the weirdest thing is that she actually writes about her friends’ sexual escapades, and they don’t seem to mind one bit. I guess that’s New York for you. Sometimes, I wish that my friends would give me license to do the same; then again, I’d still be facing a blank page, even if they did.

Speaking of friends, one of them (circa "Waaazaaa?!?") just came on MSN and demanded that I air his opinions on the Rico Yan-Claudine Barretto/ABS-CBN/GMA 7 controversy. Sorry, dude, that might be fodder for an article, but showbiz disputes aren’t my bag. Besides, since there’s enough multimedia mudslinging to last till the next elections, I prefer to watch than to participate. And I already used the MSN conversation thing the last time my muse took off, so no deal.

In my desperation, I turn to my favorite source of information and entertainment: the Net. One of those sites suggests free-writing as a remedy to un-stick the stuck: sort of like those old psychology word-association tricks. But the only words I could come up with were Hugh. Jackman. Hugh Jackman. Mrs. Wolverine. Blank screen, deadline, stomach flurries, Prozac. Big help!

I stare at Hugh Jackman’s web pages for a while before forcing myself back to reality. Some writers have tons of ideas that they capture and pin down in their notebooks, but my handwriting has gotten so unintelligible that the only thing I can make out is "Mrs. Hugh Jackman." I check out another site that advises problematic writers to try a few exercises, one of the more interesting of which is the "sh*tty first draft," which claims to address the problem of setting out to write something "good, opening the door to all the demons of self-disparagement, self-judgment and perfectionism — for of course, it’s not really enough that the work is ‘good,’ it needs to be ‘great,’ or really it should be ‘the best, most insightful piece of prose that has ever been seen by human eyes...’ which, the writer soon discovers, the piece she’s working on obviously is not."

To break out of this, the sh*tty first draft is recommended: "Really sh*tty. Let it be as bad as it comes out — clumsy word choice, incomprehensible run-on sentences, wooden dialogue and all. Even go with a poorly thought-out idea and moronically improbable ending. The only rule about getting out a sh*tty first draft is that you finish it." But as I’m already an expert at sh*tty first, second, third, and final drafts, this isn’t new to me.

Another little unblocker is "self-dialogue, to better understand the part of you that creates so that you can better harmonize your writing goals with your creative process (i.e. — so you’re not always kicking yourself and making yourself too miserable to write)." Too late, and little too schizo for me: "Start a spontaneous and free-form dialogue between your conscious self (‘I’) and your unconscious creative self. Give your creative self a separate identity, even a name or let the name come out of the dialogue." Uh huh.

Finally, before frustration gets the best of me and I start invading the chat rooms to study deviant behavior, I find one last nugget of writer’s block wisdom: "Another way to work through the block — that also keeps your writing muscles from atrophying — is writing about writer’s block."

Now there’s an idea — if only I could get through a sh*tty first draft with a poorly thought-out idea and moronically improbable ending, and finish it.

Time to panic.

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