Show, Don't Tell

I feel myself hitting that brick wall of writer's block again....

Oddly, it's happening as I'm writing more.

The block, though, is quite different this time. It's not a total block. It's more like a blindness, an inability to be creative with words, to see the world in metaphors and to describe the world with color.

It's the result of spending more time "reporting" on what I'm reading. I am conveying information. I'm linking to reports written by others and, in some cases, re-writing parts of reports to frame quotes from stories in order to interest an audience into investigating the original story...

Reporting is hard work. It is seeing facts, not seeing metaphors. It's like looking at a British banker in his bowler and tie, and never being aware of, or caring about, the fact that he's sporting women's underwear.

The women's underwear, actually, aren't a fact--they're more just a fancy. And if I can't describe the fancy of that underwear in factual terms--yes, it was black lace with pink ribbons--I can't really say much about it.

I started thinking about how I felt creatively dried up as I was thinking about the plethora of poets that populate this region--but how so much of their poetry is a reporting of what happened to them, without metaphor or simile or wordcolor. When I hear their verse, I hear rhymes, but no pictures. Tones--a kind of mouth-music--but no color. Emotional states are concrete states of being and are not conveyed in words other than those that we would immediately recognize. The "I" of so many of the poems is "scared" or "happy" or simply describes, Proust-like, an action.

I wondered where such dead-verse comes from, and I realized, as I remembered an article that discussed writing news headlines in a particular way to entice search engines, that, for me, by having to report I am somehow getting pulled away from my ability to see. . . and think that many people live in their own little boxes, without ever truly seeing

And recognize I am becoming word-color blind.

I wonder if it's just a phase, if it will pass. I worry if I spend too much time seeing the black-and-white facts that I'll forget how to see the wonderful colors of metaphors.

When I look back at my post-collegiate writer's block, I see that some of that came from all my writing having been channelled into hardcore academic writing. I had no time to push through to see the colors of the world because I was not only writing a thesis but also taking classes and synthesising more information than I ever thought I would...

And I think about how, with the internet, so many people are just constantly and religiously searching for information. As if information will make them better people or will give them some edge over other people.

And know that many of them are failing to see the world around them any more.

If it's not "just the facts"--stripped down to search-engine readability--it has no purpose.

To me, there is no joy in a life that is all information. There is no "juice" to that kind of life. No sweetness, no color. Like trading a beautiful golden-ripe orange for a stalk of whithered broccoli.

By no color I mean, literally, no color. When I lose my zest, my inability to write and experience metaphor, the world begins to look kind of dull, like on a partly-cloudy day. Food doesn't have a taste any more. People look flat, almost two-dimensional.

And I feel like I'm observing the world behind a pane of glass. I am dis-engaged.

I wonder how I can re-engage without divorcing myself from my work. My income isn't huge, but what I make is essential. I can't just fly off and say "oh, I'm sorry, my creative juices are all stopped up and I have to go get myself in some kind of pickle so I can taste the world again."

That's kind of immature, really. Lots of people learn to balance the two worlds.

Maybe it's just a matter of that I haven't learned how to do all that yet. That's a distinct possibility. Thing is, though, I fear that, since I'm not a young sprite with a super-flexible brain that can re-arrange and quickly create the connections necessary to bridge the two hemispheres of fact and fancy that I might end up stuck in one mode or the other.

That would be a disaster. I'd be left either in an e-mote of metaphor or behind a pane of hard-fact glass. . .and either state would, on some level, leave me unproductive.

I don't quite know my way around, or out of this. I don't know the Process by which I might find some resolution. So, I worry....unproductive as worry is...I still... worry.....