Writer’s block is a funny thing. Some days inspiration attacks, grabbing you by the throat and forcing you to write whatever comes to mind. It pulls the creativity from your mind and creates something beautiful, refilling the stash of creativity once it gets low. But other days, dreadful days, there’s nothing. Nothing comes to mind, and you’re left tapping your fingers against the keyboard, searching for words that refuse to come. We all feel it, on the edge of our minds, threatening to attack the day before that three-page paper is due or the moment there’s finally a break in homework long enough to write for pleasure. It feels like nothing you write is good enough, like none of the words you put on the page mesh in quite the right way. It’s a dark feeling, hopeless and miserable. Once you have felt the electricity of sudden inspiration, to have such silence in your mind is deafening. To have no ideas, or to have no ideas that seem to work, is the temporary death of a writer, waiting for a spark to bring it to life again.

And that spark will come, perhaps in the night, while you lie there in the shadows, waiting for that perfect idea, or perhaps while exercising, the pure energy allowing your head to clear and your mind to find the words it could not before. Of course, this could never possibly come when you want it to, no, it has to strike an hour before an important exam or when it’s already midnight and you have to wake up early the next morning. But if a writer listens to that muse, the little voice telling him that no matter what the consequences might be, the only thing that matters right now is forcing these words onto paper, getting them down, it could be one of the most beautiful pieces he’s ever written. Or it could be the worst, but he still took that chance, and wrote something. He allowed that idea to flow, to become something beautiful. And this idea is the most precious thing of all, the creativity of a mind, allowed to roam free, beyond the wall that writers block forces up, edging past it while it seems the block won’t notice, being given the chance to explore new ideas and concepts and discover something new about a topic you would have never realized without writing it out or a new character that is brought to life as you tap your fingers along the keyboard, uncertain where the idea is taking you. Which is why, even if you must traverse barren fields in your mind to climb the wall that is writers block, it’s worth it for the beautiful ideas in the end.

Image Credit: Writer’s Block. Digital image. Blogging Through Writer’s Block. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2012.

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