Writer’s Block

I was at a wedding reception at a Dinosaur BBQ in New Jersey. At fourteen, I was too young to engage with the homeowners and workers and too old to sit with the children. 

I was approached by a man with a strange look in his eyes. As I recall he was wearing a bright purple button-down shirt and his family was sitting at the adjacent table, a wife and two small children. His family looked rattled.

I believe he’d read some Tony Robbins. 

“Hello there! What’s your name? I’m Jonothan.”
“Elise.”
“Nice to meet you!” He shook my hand and I could feel his warm sweaty palm. “What do you do?”
“Nothing, yet. I’m in highschool.”
“Oh, well it’s never too early. I’m a consultant.” He explained to me with passion verging on mania the importance of loving what you do, pursuing it doggedly, being a person of passion and conviction. His wife stared into the distance abjectly. I found myself, too young to buy my own cigarettes, wondering persistently whether I could go bum one on the street and smoke it without absorbing a smell which would betray my activities to my parents on the car-ride home. 

Finally, he made a break in his monologue. 

“What do you love to do?”
“I like to write.”
“Then do it 13 hours a day! That’s what it takes!” he said, certainty emerging from his pores like a noxious cloud. 

Though he harbored a strange and sputtering countenance and a fervency bordering on insanity there is something that happens when someone chooses to apply the whole focus of their philosophy directly to you. This man’s effect on my fourteen year old mind was to propel me into four years of persistent escapism. I experienced extreme guilt each time I spent any hour of the day doing anything other than writing.

It is great fun to throw caution to the wind, but when the wind changes, as wind is bound to do, your cares catch up with you. And a cold wind it can be. If I needed any stronger feeling of WRITE, LOSER! I don’t know how it could have arrived. 

I am driven to write by the feeling of being the kind of person who gets approached by shmarmy men at wedding receptions not about sex but about the state of my soul. Like an existential nausea. I just don’t feel right.

In Horace Miner’s classic anthropological text, he says one must “Make strange the familiar, and familiar the strange.” I believe that practice is fundamental not just to anthropology but to all writing.

No one should write for thirteen hours a day. It’s untenable. Writing is merely a physical act of making markings on paper. Please do not be like myself and spend nearly a decade agonizing over every moment not spent writing. If you don’t want to write right now, don’t! Go pet a cat or ask for someone’s number. If you suffer the compulsion to write, it will need no help from you. In fact, it may cause relationships to end, jobs to be quit, homework to be neglected. Immerse yourself in the familiar until it becomes too strange to bear — then when the time is right, tell all about it.