Often I hear other writers make a claim which sounds so bizarrely alien to me that I have trouble understanding exactly what is meant:
“I can’t think of anything to write about.”
Now, I happily lay claim to a healthy-sized bucket of faults, shortcomings and inadequacies, but lacking ideas which interest me has (so far) never been a problem. If anything, my problem is the exact opposite: I usually have a half-dozen cool ideas and writing projects tugging at me like wolves, stretching me in every direction all at once. Right now, f’rinstance, I’m trying to slog through the first draft of a new rom-com, but I am also finger-painting notes and ideas for a rather odd comb-genre project which seems to have attracted the interest of another movie buddy, plus I am still tweaking notes and ideas to further improve last year’s war drama which needs to be polished and sent out to make the marketing rounds, and I also have a pretty damned entertaining partner-written rom-com which needs one more good rewrite if it is ever to be truly worthy of consideration and notice.
That’s just on the screenwriting front. In other writing I have a pair of local columns I need to get busy with, and I have local contact who wants me to com e in to talk about all sorts of writing projects he needs for a pair of startup companies he’s running. And then there’s this silly waste of time and energy. Mind-boggling though it be, I actually get a then but steady flow of emails from folks who claim to wish that I’d put more content onto the web in this blog and in other odd sandboxes where I sometimes cavort.
Meanwhile, Real Life remains as ass-munching beast clearly hell-bent to wrestle me to the ground so that I might more easily hop up and down on my bloody lifeless carcass. A quick run-down of the responsibilities and duties and commitments on the kid-rearing front would sound like some exercise in self-congratulatory hyperbole, so instead I’ll just say “I’m dealing with a lot of shit right now.” Believe that or not—no big whoop.
Yet I read and chat with other writers whose biggest complaint seems to be a lack of things to write about?
And half the time I feel like saying “here, take these ten ideas which I know I’ll never have time to consider or play with.”
Writers block? Christ on a cracker—you might as well talk to me about time travel or anti-gravity. What I need is a 35-hour day so that I might more easily get to all the stuff I need and want to deal with every damned day, but that seems a tad unlikely at this stage of the game.
So instead, I’ll just keep on keepin’ on same as ever, staggering and swaggering forward one clumsy day at a time, trying to balance a twelve foot tall pile of ideas and projects and dreams, trying not to get too pissed if every once in a while one falls off the heap and lands with a crash.
March or die. No sleep 'til Compton. There'll be time for rest in the grave.
Onwards.
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