Writer's Block

To overcome the terror of the blank screen and the blinking cursor threatening to erase my ideas in the process of fashioning them into words, I often scribble everything from emails to academic essays on paper first. This is an inefficient process, I know, but it beats staring off into space watching my thoughts collide. And it means nothing is lost. I can always go back after a false start. It also allows me to work simultaneously on the half dozen or so different ideas jostling for my attention at the same time. The filtering process comes later as I try to decipher what I have written and determine what ideas the scattered notes refer to.

So goes the theory. Sometimes, however, even pen and ink is no use:
At the end of this scribbling exercise, with my internal hamster fallen hard off its wheel, I put down my fountain pen, picked up my camera, and then started work on this blog post:
Time for a new blank page...