(This isn’t) Writer’s Block

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Location: The Manitoba Legislature – Winnipeg, Manitoba

Over coffee and pastries the other week, Topher made a joke about how I might finish my third book by next year. I didn’t laugh.

This isn’t writer’s block. I don’t have writer’s block, because I know exactly what I want to say. The problem is that I can’t find the will to actually sit down and put the words on (digital) paper.

This is hardly the first time that I’ve hit a snag major roadblock in my writing career. Like most writers, my discipline for my craft ebbs and flows. There are months of absolute productivity, when I spend every free second furiously scribbling and every second that I have to spend on something else counting down until I can start writing again. And there are periods of time where I walk past my manuscript, day after day, acknowledging its presence but refusing to so much as pick it up. It happened with my first book. And again with my second. This is not new territory that I am trying to navigate. A bout of writer’s block is exasperating, but nothing I haven’t managed to overcome before.

And like I said, this isn’t writer’s block. Writing isn’t the problem. It’s the computer.

My third book is finished, you see – at least technically. The first draft is meticulously written, and rewritten, in a black Moleskine notebook full of folded yellow Post-It notes where I’ve added to the original text. But I need to type it all out now. And for a while, I was doing exactly that, working away diligently on Saturday afternoons in my cozy office through the winter months when it was too cold to go anything else. I planned to be finished the typing by April of this year, but I got stalled somewhere around chapter twenty-one. The computer I use to transition my manuscripts from handwritten to typed is the same on that I used for my day job, and at the moment, the idea of spending even one second longer than is absolutely neccessary in front of that machine is more than I can bear.

So I’m just not writing. Unless you count Instagram captions (and these posts, of course.) This has been going on for months, and there is no end in sight as far as I can tell. But it’s not writer’s block.

It doesn’t really matter, of course. All my deadlines are self-inflicted. I try to remember that my first book took me the better part of half my life to finish, and that I spent the better part of four years on the second. It was hardly realistic to expect that I would polish off work on the third in a year and a half. That didn’t stop me hoping, mind you – because while in many ways I don’t really know what will happen after I finish this third book, I am looking forward to finally giving these characters, who I’ve lived with for close to two decades, an ending, so we can all move on.

This isn’t writer’s block. But even if it isn’t, it’s something equally disruptive and creatively limiting… so here’s hoping that I’ll feel differently about sitting down at my computer when we get back from Athens.

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