TheJunkenstein: @Marinaisgo Write exactly about your writer’s block, your relationship with writing, what has put you in a dry spot. Go for the feelings
I have 5 drafts sitting in my blog archives right now, all different things I’m trying to put together, or figure out. None of them are happening and I’m kind of stuck. I want to write about the failure of identity politics, and my personal relationship with my birthday, and the concept that transgender issues can easily affect cisgendered people, and a hundred other things, but so far I’ve got shit.
If you’ve ever carted wool, which you probably haven’t, and which I actually only vaguely remember doing myself (it’s been about 17 years), you’ll understand when I say that writing for me is like carting wool. You take the clump of gross, almost sticky, unpleasant raw wool, so fresh from the sheep that some of it still has shit on it (it’s washed, but some things persist), and you mash it onto one carder (which looks like a wire dog brush), then rake it from one carder to another in a methodical repetition that breaks apart the fibers and makes it suitable for spinning. My feelings, experiences and ideas are the raw wool, my draft process is carding, my final draft is spinning and the reader finishes the process by weaving or knitting (or whatever) the final piece for themselves.
So I’m not really having writers block, I’m just in the unpleasant beginning parts of far too many things for me to be happy or comfortable with. With crafts or art it’s easy for me to start, and go wherever I want, but writing seems to have more significance, especially when it goes on this blog that everyone can see. I know that I’m a skilled writer, if not a good one, so I expect a higher quality from it than from any of my other creative outlets, especially when the subject is serious, like the subject matter for all the blogs I have in the works. When it’s something with less perceived impact, like these twitter blogs I’ve been doing, there is a lot more room for error, and it feels informal.
So the issue is that while I can bang out a twitter blog and not think about it, those other blogs stay with me for months sometimes. I’ll be doing dishes, working, or driving home and running the subject matter over and over in my mind, slowly, methodically, separating each fiber, making it more and more suitable to be something else. Because as it is, there is nothing separating the emotions from the experiences, the reason from the passion, and I feel very frustrated at my inability to take these ideas straight from my head and have them make sense.
I want people to read them and like them–and like me–but I have to organize everything first. And the anxiety over being misunderstood, or misrepresenting myself only makes the process more difficult.