No really, what can I say-it is a writer’s worst nightmare when there is nothing there. We write
because we enjoy writing but more important I have always thought, we write to learn more about ourselves and the world we live in. Writing allows us to decipher our feelings and the state of who we are at any specific time, we allow our subconscious the ability to explore and redefine our thoughts and how we relate to society and those around us we call friends or acquaintances.

So what does a writer or poet for that matter do when there is nothing evidently up there to explore or decipher? I believe that this point for the creative person is actually the opposite of what it seems, there is too much to decipher and too much to explore and the brain has not yet processed or perfected the work of poetry or prose. I have always thought we go through points of growth, thought fermentation and finally creative explosions-each are dependent upon our experiences and how we change and grow as creative people.

When poems or writing finally comes out it seems to flow as if it were already written and it just needed hands without second guessing their processes. I believe the ferment process is probably one of the longest points of the creative process-for me, images, thoughts, emotions are quickly recorded on a daily and often constant basis-these thoughts and feelings attach to images that I see and experience every day. Slowly the words and thoughts attach to symbols in images as well as abstract connections to pictures that don’t even necessarily make logical sense.

Once the process of fermentation occurs, the words are pretty much formed and the poem is already written in memory. When the emotion or time lends itself, words come out eerily natural as if they had been formed long before they were written. All of the images that I see over that period of time become parts of different pieces of my writing without trying or questioning rhyme or flow. This process is called the trial web shift-this is a technique I have previously read about where you draw clusters of words and the poem or writing forms from that process, I have learned that my clustering seems to be done during the fermenting process and without actually drawing those words and clusters the connections are formed through time and experience intangibly.

One aspect of the feeling of the creative explosion for me is the lack of realization of any of the words I am writing-all of the words form quickly and I feel almost in a state of auto-pilot. The fingers type as if the work is being copied from somewhere but the state of creation is so hard to articulate because it is almost like being in a trance. After, usually fifteen or so poems, the words become slower to form and the conscious starts to be cognitive of logic and word choice and for me the flow is broken.

I have recently, unfortunately been in a growth period, following a state of a writers’ block that has been as overwhelming as it was depressing-The inability to write is like having so many thoughts and feelings in memory you can’t concentrate on the conscious state-this is not often conducive to having a normal busy life. So here we are again-ready to write on the other side of a seemingly hopeless block-hopefully the words will flow freely from here on-at least for a while.

What do you do to break a writer’s block and have you had that state of absence during the creative experience.