Recently, while working on my novel, I came to discover that my computer was no longer my friend. I would sit at it for hours with the blank screen taunting me like an enemy. I went to place my fingers on the keyboard and nothing would come to me; the creativity just stopped and I couldn’t form any words. It’s a severely depressing experience to know that the one thing you love to do in life could end so abruptly and dramatically. I couldn’t even form poetry in any sort of sense, I think I managed a haiku.
I didn’t do any work for the longest time. I found the digitalised paper on the screen to be lackluster and soulless. What do you do when the main tool you use no longer works for you? Is there a set way for overcoming this problem? Can someone just turn around and have overcome all obstacles against them?
My remedy came to me one day. I picked up a small notepad, popped on some stand up comedy on the tv and sat there. There was something enlightening about the happiness and mirth that was coming from the screen and I found myself writing. At first it was just some small pieces of poetry but as I went on my mind automatically went back to my novel. To begin with only lines were written but then paragraphs formed and soon I had written a chapter. So this is how I finished it; the last remaining chapters written on the nigh on old-fashioned pen and paper. There was something to be said about the feel of a notepad beneath your hands and I can understand where the original love for writing came from.
Writer’s blocks are such scary things, can there be only one way to overcome them? Or are all remedies as individualised as the writers that suffer them?
The Torn Page - A K Hinchey's Writing Blog 