"Writer's Block"

One of the funny things about writing is the more you do it, the more you find yourself needing to do it. Writing becomes like a musical instrument or an artist’s canvas. You need to sit down from time to time and create something on your instrument or fill the blank canvas with the hues and shadows of your thoughts and ideas. The problem, of course, is that when the urge to write strikes, nothing says it will bring conveniently along with it an idea, a topic, a direction, and a purpose. This phenomenon – when a writer sits down to write but cannot think of anything to say or how to say it – has long been referred to as writer’s block.

It just so happens I have a terminal case of the stuff right now.

The inability to think of something about which to write is debilitating to say the least. All the baseline tools are present: desire, time, commitment, relative quiet in the house, success in having fooled your spouse into thinking your honey-dos are complete; but the all important tool – something to write about – is absent.

The worst thing one can do in this situation is force it. Anything written under duress (this particular application of the word “duress” does not include the publisher’s second graciously extended deadline) comes out as the literary equivalent of that free-handed quartering away shot taken too long after dusk, over too great a distance, and through too much tree debris. Chances are you’ll miss the mark and end up doing more harm than if you hadn’t bothered at all.

So the mind reels in an attempt to unlock a story the way the tumblers pass over numbers on the gun safe dial searching for the combination that will allow the door to be opened. As the fingers of my mind sift through various memories, experiences, mishaps, and opinions, they pass over all manner of things I suppose I could write about, were it not for this aggressive case of writer’s block.

There is the collection of sunrises I have been blessed enough to witness over the years. Sunrises so varying and so brilliant that my faith has been supercharged every time I have seen them and I have been brought to tears more than once by their enormity and beauty. I remember one particular sunrise I watched seven years ago on a still Sumter County, Alabama morning just as vividly as the orange-purplish striated prelude I witnessed just six days ago over a dove field near my home. The day awoke to find me huddled in a tripod stand overlooking a thin road that ran parallel to a stream and separated a juvenile pine plantation from a soggy hardwood bottom. I was there to hunt hogs the weekend before the deer rifle season opened and, given the object of my quarry, had already exhibited too much dedication by getting up so early just to shoot pigs. About thirty minutes after I got settled, a piercing sunrise erupted from the pine tops to my left and conquered me and the dew-drenched earth beneath it. I watched that sunrise and stared at its altering spectrum of colors until the sun’s brightness prevented me from looking directly at it any longer. I do not know whether any wildlife trotted beneath my stand that morning, but I would not have cared. I had been humbled within that first hour of daylight to the point that I spent the better part of the morning thinking and reflecting, rather than hunting.

I suppose I could fashion a story out of the wild turkey my wife and I watched in the hours before her first deer harvest this past January. For nearly two hours before my wife made an outstanding shot to take a mature doe and secure her first ritualistic face-bloodying, she and I watched a non-stop display of wildlife any hunter would have been thrilled to have witnessed and which would have qualified the afternoon’s hunt as a success even if no shot had been fired. The most exhilarating part of the hunt however – besides my wife’s shot itself – was provided courtesy of a majestic wild turkey.

Many people describe male turkeys as being majestic, almost to the point of triteness. This particular turkey, on the other hand, was truly majestic in the purest sense of that word; a veritable monarch among the most regal of game birds. He was so majestic, that were I - through some combination of Divine Intervention and some thus far undiscovered senility in turkeys that causes a complete loss of all self-preservation instincts - to actually call this bird to within gun range, I would in all likelihood be inclined simply to watch him put on his show until he decided he’d had enough and materialized back into the woods, rather than shoot him.

The tom entered at the top of the field and remained in the field for nearly two hours. During that time he mostly dusted and ate, poking at bugs and grit and what few seeds he could find. The most amazing thing the longbeard did while he graced us with his appearance was change colors – constantly. Because we and the gobbler occupied roughly the same spot on the earth together just before sundown, we had the rare pleasure of observing undisturbed the dynamic effects of the setting sun’s rays on the turkey’s rich and colorful plumage for the entire length of his appearance on center stage. The tom exhibited the uncanny ability to capture and re-broadcast every single hue in the natural spectrum of color, the majority of which neither of us has seen before or since. When the sun shown directly on him, his breast feathers glowed with a medallion-like blue-gold iridescence, and swayed subtly like rolling waves across his chest. Moments later those same feathers would put off a warm reddish-orange rust not unlike the russet horizon above a wildfire at sundown. Greens, purples, yellows, golds, browns, maroons, and all manner of colors danced and melded in a non-stop visual alchemy I can still see today when I close my eyes. Every time he moved, that turkey invented a new blend of color, aided by the measured demise of the day’s sun. We started out commenting on how breathtaking he was. By the time his craw was filled and he left the field to go roost for the night, we were speechless.

Writer’s block is tough. Maybe I could make some hay out of a touching case of sibling rivalry I witnessed while I was a guest at an old camp in the swamps of Monroe County, Alabama about four years ago. One of the members had with him his son and daughter. If memory serves, the boy was about nine and the girl was seven. They had been hunting with their dad for a couple years but neither had killed that elusive first deer. Dad hunted with the son one morning but they had no luck. That afternoon, however, was different. Father and daughter sat together and enjoyed a great hunt. We were all thrilled that night when little sister burst through the door of the camp house and announced that she’d taken her first deer. We followed her outside where indeed her doe lay across the rack on her dad’s SUV. She wasted no time letting big brother know she’d gotten her first deer before he got his. He took it like a man, but I overheard him more than once quietly commit his dad to sitting with him the following morning. Dad’s pride was so evident we could smell it on him as thick as the flavored smoke rolling off the rib eyes that night as both father and daughter told the story again and again.

The cure for writer’s block is as of yet undiscovered. No one knows where the malady comes from or how long it will last once it strikes its victim. All I can do is suffer through it, confident I’ll think of something to write about eventually.



(c) Roger Guilian 2006