Pain and pleasure. Agony and Ecstasy. Writing — and writing. Those who do will know what I mean. For those who don’t, I’ll try to explain.
Sometimes it bubbles forth like lava, searing hot, blinding, unstoppable, one image chasing the other, the right word I tried to find the day before being crowded out by ones even righter, a chapter just beginning to form on the screen but whose end has already linked hands with the next one in my mind. I might have shut down my laptop, cursing the bitter exercise in frustration less than twenty-four hours ago. Yet now, my fingers have a mind of their own. They flit over the keyboard expressing thoughts hardly formed, and I ask myself how I could have thought that my muse had decided to gaslight me when she is right here, sitting on my shoulder and whispering sweet somethings into my ear, each word a gem, each phrase a string of writer’s pearls.
When I finally stop, rubbing my eyes with hands that don’t want to leave the keys, I know that I’ve finally done it. I don’t know how. But this evening’s creative torrent has washed away all those nights of word drought with the inexorability of the mother of all tsunamis. And when the next evening doesn’t start with fireworks, I sit back, my hands cradling the back of my head.
It’ll come.
I sit. Waiting. Nothing. I do a few laps through the dining room, the living room, the small guest room, then sit again. I’ll type a few words, I say to myself. They won’t be the right ones, but they’ll get the flow going.
I do. They don’t.
The wrong words? I try again with another half-sentence that sits there, grinning at me and my insipid efforts to kick-start the flow.
It was unstoppable just one night ago, a monsoon of ideas that turned into paragraphs threatening to overflow my screen, spill onto my desk, and carry me away to a better place, where my only task is to choose among which of the exquisite turns of phrase flooding my mind is the one that says what I wanted the best that will be committed to my monitor.
Not tonight, though. Tonight, my mind remains dry, barren, a Death Valley of ideas. As does my screen. Except for these thoughts. They did nothing to advance my manuscript. But putting them down will help me sleep better tonight. And if nothing else, get me some likes.
King Jaffe Joffer:
“So you see, my son, there is a very fine line between love and nausea.”
