Writing Excercise: Ironically, It's About Writer's Block

Dear diary,

It hadn’t been a good start of the day. In fact, that’s putting it very lightly. Horrible is the word I was looking for. But I haven’t been very good with words and ideas today… Thanks to… Writer’s block.

See, I believed I was quite proficient at what I did. Previously, writer’s block sounded like an Australian outback factoid, a myth: distant and far from believable. Now, and again, much like those factoids, I realise the unavoidable truth of it, its ghastly reality and its heightened importance in my life. It’s such a shame. I allowed my story to unfold the way it wanted to; the way that felt right. Somewhere along the line, watching this creation of mine come to life, I made a grave error in its nurturing.

This morning, as I typed out “Chapter Forty-Five”, the blankness of the page glowed with overwhelming intensity.  Thinking of it as a momentary lapse of my vision, I proceeded to type out my character’s thoughts in 14, Times New Roman. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t. The witty and enigmatic dialogue in my head appeared clumsy and half-hearted when typed by hand. Mildly embarrassed, I made to change the font.

It’s downright pretentious, isn’t it? The fact that a font can affect my state of creativity, but it does. Having had moments like this before, panic wasn’t even in my vast peripheral vision.

Thirty-four terrible attempts at editing the starting paragraph made me reach my damning diagnosis. I was down with writer’s block and the cure was not something that could be bought at a twenty-four hour pharmacy. Google presents fifty-three pages, filled with nonchalantly chosen links, that claim to help me rid of my writer’s block. Extravagantly hopeful words appear on three of the links I chose; the other three are about as positive as an electron. Human nature, however, is always more attentive to negativity, so my self-esteem is plummeting; but not with the euphoric feeling in the stomach of a bungee jumper. My plummet is more likely to end in the depths Tartarus.