Writer's Block

It’s emptiness, void of thought, of feeling, like a vacuum sucking you hollow of oxygen, feeling, and experiences among much else. Crumbs of thoughts clump into flimsy ideas turn into words scribbled down and subsequently, often violently scratched out, sometimes ripping through the page in front of you. Or, you watching your finger pushing down hard on the backspace key till nothing remains much like the abyss within you.

Nothing is right.

Nothing is right, but more importantly it is over-thought, pointless, boring, overcooked to a crisp like blackened toast. Your much-abused notebook page stares at you expectantly. The blank screen waits.

Your move.

You pick up and try once more. Some ten minutes later the whole sequence may repeat. After you have drained your laptop battery of all power, after you have crushed up several pieces of note paper smothered in black and blue ink, after your hands, palms and fingers are covered into smudges and calluses, somewhere between banging your head into the wall and morning:

It stops.

Or rather it starts. The dam bursts, the doors open, the silence erupts into beautiful chaos.

It is here that the pages come and do not stop.

Red Roses in Grand Central

Rich sweet scent of deep blood-red roses wafts towards where I stand, near the clock in the middle. The building in all it’s grandeur, majestic walls stretch into an elaborately gold laced ceiling, quietly watching the human bodies, each breathing, living, experiencing, as they weave in and out of each other. It is 5:15pm on a Friday evening, prime time for commuters catching their rides up north. The conversational chatter all around me is punctuated by train timing, track location and important safety messages booming through the building over a loudspeaker. The roses pass me by, and I smile, slightly disappointed that they are not in his hands. But I turn my head away to other distractions, tricks of the mind and the little games I play with myself. I see passersby morph into grade-school teachers, old friends from college, and lovers past. I remember smiles, words spoken, fits of laughter, falling on the floor when you’ve had too much to drink, the little moments that seem so trivial and yet so eternal at the same time. They float in my mind, images that materialize and disappear in an instant. My eyes shut, and the salty tears force themselves out of the wrinkles that are slowly embedding themselves into their corners. I can’t remember his smile, or his laugh, or our last conversation. I can’t remember my hands in his, our last kiss, and that nostalgic feeling of peace, of no interruptions or pauses. I can't remember feeling that it was forever, even though I know I did.

One moment changed our lives forever. As I sat at his deathbed, watching him cling onto the last breaths of his life, I held him, and feeling him slip away I let him go. Go with God. On 5:15pm at the clock in the middle of Grand Central Terminal, I see his form one last time, in the figures of the human traffic surrounding me. He is smiling once more, that quiet shy smile of his, and he is bringing me red roses again.

***disclaimer***
This is a work of fiction. Nobody that brought me red roses ever died (to my knowledge) and there is no truth in this story at all. I often begin writing with an image in my mind, and keep going to see where it takes me. In this case, this is where I found myself. With a women who had lost her love, and was looking to find him again in the crowded Grand Central Terminal. But it is completely fictional in story.

Inspiration for the Uninspired

In the past months I have not written much. Bits and pieces of stories, poetry and journal entries here and there but nothing serious. I feel that I have become a little static in my writing. I recently got published (yay) in the FIT student magazine. Seeing my work in there reminded me of my secret, guilty-pleasure and not-quite-admitted dream. To be a writer. To be able to write poetry into prose like Salman Rushdie, to be able to carve a story through weaving plotlines, to create characters that would never be forgotten. I feel that my writing is immature, like it has so long to go before I get it to where I want it. I also feel a lack of inspiration, because in the past months I’ve been more like a machine than anything else – eating, sleeping, working, exercising. In between I go out with friends, watch movies and have the occasional dinner party. I never write.

They say you should write every day, keep a journal, write something, anything. But then again I feel so uninspired, so dry for anything more than a poem squeezed out here or there when I feel the mood for a few minutes. I am too distracted, so my resolution now is to keep writing and bring back what used to come so easy. I don’t know that I could ever give up everything and write, not while I’m still young anyways. Writing gets better with age and maturity. I feel like I have so much to live and experience before I could fully do that. But I need to keep going, whether I ever pursue it professionally or not, the words must keep flowing. I must get past this block and onto the next phase, whatever that may be. Writers must always write. It’s what keeps them going, it’s in the blood running through their veins, it’s in their bones.

Writing & Truth

Writing is a funny thing...you kind of just need to let the words come. I was thinking about this as I was killing time on my day off this past monday, sitting at the Barnes & Noble on 45th Street & 5th Avenue. There can be no shame in writing, there is room only for honesty. Openness, no guilt. Guilt covers and attempts to hide true sides of self that are concealed in our everyday intereactions. Writing seeks to draw these hidden places, these secret thoughts and shamed feelings out, set them free and expose them for what they are. Pure truth, based on perspective, but but truth all the same. There can be many truths, many realities, many versions of fact. But no matter what truth is, and what lies within the soul, it is the core of the self that shrouds it. It is meaning and must be set free. Sometimes when I have major writers block I realize that part of it is due to the fact that I am not being true to myself - I'm trying to create something that isn't really me. Writing after all should be you - always you and never anything false or feigned.

On Writing

As a writer one of the things I struggle with most is reading - how do you balance what you take in and what you put out? Where is interpreting, incorporating or hinting at someone else's words, thoughts or ideas plagiarism? A 19 year old student is facing charges that her novel is too similar to one of her favorite books - did she intentionally copy or was it all just a big mistake?

I don't know what is safest when you're writing - just not to read at all? I, myself, try not to read before I write during the day. If I'm planning on writing I will not open whatever I'm reading at the time...I feel like it's too risky. I'll read after I'm done writing for the day. But is that enough? Just because I sleep for 8 hours or so, does that mean that what I read the day before can no longer affect what I write?

According to www.dictionary.com, 'plagiarism' is defined as follows:
n 1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work 2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own [syn: plagiarization, plagiarisation, piracy]

Obviously what you write is influenced by what you read. You only ever broaden your horizons when you read, and in turn it makes you a better writer. But where is the line between inspiration and copying? This always makes me uncomfortable. I feel like my style is definitely influenced by what I read, but does that mean I copy? Do I imitate someone else's style? Is it then not completely my own? How do I know?

According to Plagiarism.org, in a study by the Center for Academic Integrity, 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once and 36% admit to copying written material. According to The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next (Free Press, July 1996)in 1969 58.3% of high school students allowed someone to use or copy their work. This percentage rose to 97.5% by 1989. The internet has made it that much easier to cheat...so is this girl just an example of another person taking advantage of the system? Or did she have the best of intentions.

I guess from my own perspective, I would never willingly copy anyone else's work. But how do I control the unintentional?

For more information check out:
http://www.plagiarism.org/index.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060502/ap_en_ot/young_author

Ink

Procrastination. I write the word out slowly and carefully in a beautiful cursive script. I trace it again on top pondering over each letter. I go over it again. And again. When I’m finished I underline the word. Then I draw a box around it. Then I draw a box around the box. I shade in both boxes leaving the word itself intact. I try to stop there but my pen stays firmly connected to paper.

My pen keeps moving.

My pens keeps moving and has a life of it’s own, a spirit, a destiny. The ink spreads over the blank page like a disease, like cancer, reaching it’s bony fingers to every nook, every cranny, every tiny bit of white space till there is none left. It moves independent of my thoughts, independent of my hand, independent of that part of the brain moving the hand. It carries me with it. It cannot stop moving. It runs out of space on the page, but that burning hunger is still there, it moves onto the table underneath the page. It scratches the lacquered surface as it goes. The pen will not stop. It starts to move faster and faster replacing the light brown surface with one that is scraped blue. The pen must go on. The wall, the ceiling and the floor are next. The pen must not stop.

I try, oh believe me I do try to take back control, to reclaim my authority. I try not to give in as my body trails the pen across the floor of my hardwood living room, through the dining room and into the bedroom. My knees are scraped and every bare part of my body is stained blue as I keep going and going. The pen is the master now. I scramble to keep up, my body burning in pain from the friction of trying to slide and scramble across the floor. As it goes through the bedroom door the pain is becoming unbearable, I want to peel my whole body off, shed the load, shed the burden. At the foot of my bed it stops.

It is out of ink.

I stare at it and using my hand gently try and move the pen. It will not give in at first, clinging onto the last vestiges of the power it had over me. And then finally it surrenders.

I put it down flat on my palm, stroking the smooth outer covering gently then turning it round and round in my now blue palms. Sighing I try to stand. At first I’m not sure that I can, my knees don’t seem to have the strength. And then, using my dresser as support I rise gingerly. I walk across the blue hardwood floors, those blue chemicals permeating the skin on my heels and my toes the most. I reach the kitchen table where my page lies still, just where I left it. I can no longer read the word “Procrastination”. I move away from the page towards the trashcan nearby, and I toss the pen away.

March 27, 2004

Remembering

May 31 2005.

What seems like a different lifetime altogether was barely a year ago...I try to grasp at memories of there, but like sand it spills through the cracks between my fingers...There is a cloudy intensity that weighs down on those memories...Murkiness slinks between the days and nights at via garibaldi, into soft but slightly too small twin size beds, the identical sheets and pillows that Dara and I had picked out from Ikea...Into the bathroom with the washer that had to be drained into the toilet (a cause for much strife in our household, not to mention the dirty laundry water all over the bathroom floor, an overworked mop and a great many kitchen towels)...We move on next to the kitchen - the centerpiece of many dinner parties and late night/early morning cram sessions (when in Italy...Procrastinate)...Out to the balcony overlooking the courtyard, where Dara once dropped a very valued piece of clothing and tried to rescue it with a very strange contraption composed of a hanger among other things...The crash site of many kamikaze socks and pins, not to mention a few restless shirts that swooped off our clothesline down into our neighbor's laundry...Chrissy & Lauren's rooms stretched along the other side...And finally the living room where mal & I discussed many important issues of life...Occasionally working on a project or two...The walls that kept it cool and damp in the long winter and unbearably hot in the summer...These are things that are now far away...But in a heartbeat I can almost be there, almost feel the wind as we crossed La Ponte Vittoria over the Arno to Villa Strozzi aka The Big Hill...I can feel my shortness of breath as I climbed (the shortcut involved stairs, being afraid of heights stairs made it only worse)...I can smell the fresh cappucino they drink first thing in the morning...Feel the cool iciness of gelato dripping down my chin (from the good place across the dirty river) and all these things and more filled my days for nine months.

For those who were there they remember, they knew, they saw.