Hoover Dam: Writer’s Block

Good Lord! Writer’s block is an actual thing. And it’s awful. I always imagined it as a sort of romantic procrastination that might last a few hours. The writer sits, thoughtful on the sofa, legs purposefully crossed, as they stare into the deep, navy-blue hue of a drawing room wall. After pause for reflection on the blue wall void, they take time to light a perfectly stacked fire and return to the sofa to watch a film before sifting thoughts for a gemstone in the gravel. A civilised soupçon of vino later and they’re right back at it, returning to their desk with Tolstoy at their fingertips. But it isn’t like that. Nothing at all like that in fact. Of course it isn’t. But I do love to dream...

I clearly have a lot to learn about writing. About bearing the difficulty of creative endeavours such that passion can appear in my life. Writer’s block is a paralysis. It feels as though I have quite literally forgotten how to open my computer, click on the **WRITING folder and start tapping away (** keeps it at the top of my list even when it entirely escapes action for months). I just don’t know how to do it. I can’t. I can no longer write. To be clear, I can still string words together and use my computer – I am not entirely incapacitated which would be easier – but only to write things like emails to the school confirming the veracity of the ‘no crop tops’ rule on comic relief day. That kind of thing. It’s not even a gilded cage. In these writing actions my children marvel at how fast I can go. Words, words, words and more words. But where have the other words gone? Why can’t I let them flow from my fingers in the satisfying tip tappy rhythm of the space bar two step?

I learnt to type fast as a kid using a toy designed to hone secretarial skills early because creative play lacked productivity for a child of Maggie Thatcher. I played it over and over enthralled by the wpm going up and up. I only ever truly perfected one meditation of the middle line though.

 a lad had a gal a gal had a lad (repeat ad infinitum)

Revolutionary stuff! Perhaps the advert should read, “Makes sure your daughter can type really, really fast, whilst also reinforcing a doctrine of heteronormative ownership as a mode of expression!!!” Advert or not, I learnt to type what I was told to. In more recent years I have found words of my own. Lots of them. I can thank psychoanalysis for that and my analyst who has tirelessly let me spew them up in all their disjointed ungainly mess. There are poetic moments of course but in general it is often a sort of unsatisfactory, hesitant and stumbling solo akin to the trumpet in the primary school Christmas concert. Not exactly pleasing to the ear but you come away with a sense of something in the making, a hope for a less ‘Scroogey’ kind of Christmas. Imagine that, three times a week, and it gives some idea of what it means to keep talking with an analyst week in, week out. It isn’t like the movies. After a few years this practice with words started to forge a space for me outside of the therapy room, a space to start typing differently, a different kind of spewing. This time my typing was not a response to a command for particular words at a particular speed. ‘I am free from the dream of the typing pool!’, I thought. ‘I can swim in the wilds!’ And that’s where I freeze. The problem of freedom is old hat, de rigueur for Sartre, but that knowledge doesn’t make it any easier to de-ice the permafrost.

So what’s happened? Where did my words go? I am pretty sure they’re around somewhere and will shoot up most unexpectedly. Like bamboo, you can’t kill the damn things. The underground rhizomes will always seek new ground to colonise. Some of them are squirrelled away under the ice layer in the private space of emails to my analyst. If I dare to be poetic there it makes sure to dam my flow. Damn dam! Hoover Dam! Yes. That’s what I have spent forty-four years building and its walls are as thick as… is there even an analogy? Hoover Dam is the analogy. Its walls are as thick as the concrete of Hoover Dam. The Colorado River is capable of a magnitudinous force that requires an impenetrable defence. Those walls aren’t going nowhere kid. They’re made of stone. They hold back the potential for a destructive flood that might totalise the landscape. If I write, I might destroy. I worry the waters I let into the world will not be ones that support life, but that flood it out. Saturate it. Ruin everything. But something isn’t right, these mixed metaphors are giving mixed messages. Words have appeared. There are shoots above the frost.