“Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego”

~Norman Mailer

How true. Sitting down to write and not being able to produce content isn’t about your mind becoming vacant. It’s about the fear that the thoughts that are coming out of it are shit. No matter how mentally exhausted, stupid, or unoriginal you get, there is always something going on upstairs. Just this weekend I listened to some idiot girl describe to me, for a full thirty minutes, a highly detailed list of what she had for dinner and her equally uninteresting opinions about that wonderful feast. This person had no qualms about broadcasting her marginally coherent and tedious thoughts into the world. Presumably, this is because she was attractive enough that no one had ever bothered to inform her that she was retarded. However, she will never experience writers block. I’m quite sure that she could sit down with her crayons and write an uninterrupted stream of content off the top of her pretty little head. “Me and my bestest friend in the whole world Julie, she’s like the coolest, oh my god, went to the like the best restaurant ever in the whole world for dinner and had the most amazing lobster soup. OH MY GOD! That lobster soup was AWESOME. I must have eaten like the whole bowl. Oh my god, it was like awesome. Maybe not as good as the lobster soup at … (I blacked out here for about 20 minutes)… I can’t believe I ate the whole bowl. I’m so fat. But it was so, like, good. Awesome. So Good. Like. Awesome.”

Sorry for subjecting you to that, but I felt it really drove home the point. You don’t stop having thoughts just because you are unoriginal and annoying. Just some people have enough respect for other literates that they are hesitant to advance their ideas in written form. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever produced anything over a paragraph long that I didn’t think was garbage. Writers block is a symptom. It is a result of a lack of a necessary arrogance. To write you have to think that your viewpoint deserves to be preserved. Even if no one reads it (perhaps a blog?), writing is like any other activity that people can judge you on. You can’t be good at it unless you have confidence. You gotta go in cocky.