Writer's Block Isn't What You Think

When I was in college, I wrote a short story entitled Agoraphobia that recounted the aftermath of a teenage boy recovering from his first real heartbreak. In order to jolt him from his doldrums, the boy's father takes him to their family's summer cottage by Lake Erie and has him chop a few cords of wood. As the boy starts attacking his chore, he listens to nearby seagulls, starts thinking of his ex-girlfriend's laughter, which eventually transmutes into the laughter of every other girl in his future destined to break his heart. The more laughter he hears, the more ferociously he chops the wood. His interior monologue is filled with self-loathing, misogyny and paranoid delusions. When he's finished, his father walks up, satisfied that he's taught his son a valuable object lesson about using manual labor to mend a broken heart. The boy, exhausted and a bit crazed, looks out at the roiling lake and wind-swept acres of land and experiences an epiphany of apoplexy while he considers the vastness of life, heartbreak and pain awaiting him.

You know, the story doesn't sound half bad when I retell it now. Back when it was written, however, it was nothing more than a histrionic, not-so-subtle rip-off of James Joyce's Araby ( http://fiction.eserver.org/short/araby.html  ). My profs liked it, though, and it ended up included in my creative thesis years later. So why am I recalling this somewhat juvenile effort now? Because I'm in the middle of almost four months of writer's block, and whenever I'm creatively constipated I invariably remember the conclusion of that story: the final image of all that open space and the resulting terror of confronting life's countless succession of eventualities, permutations and failures.

Writer's block is often described as fear of the blank page. This may be the case for some writers. But for me, writer's block is creative catatonia brought on by the endless open vista of ideas whirling around inside my brain. My friend and long-time collaborator Tony Lewis jokingly refers to me as The House of Ideas because I have a tendency to call him whenever my brain conjures its latest Big Idea. He's seen me through the script of Worlds Apart and the completion and publication of Cat & Cat. He's read my early drafts of Stalking Mule, as well as some of the stories in White Picket Jungle and outlines for three upcoming Chris Telamon novels after Stalking Mule. He's also been my sounding board for countless other "projects" I've conceived over the years:

Mighty Men, a graphic novel set in the 1800s featuring Paul Bunyan, Davey Crockett and a host of other folklore heroes pitted against a villainous Count St. Germain.

Zeitgeist Protocol, a novel about a failed artist turned detective in 1880s Austria investigating a series of Jack the Ripper-style slayings.

Fuges, an alternative-history novel about modern-day fugitive recovery agents in a world where the Union did not win the American Civil War.

Most recently, I called him to brainstorm an idea for a novel featuring Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a Masonic secret agent caught up in the political intrigues of mid-late 18th century Europe.

Add all these creative germs to my unrealized movie scripts - a comedy about a guy who wins the Lottery and decides to have the best work week ever; a psychological thriller about a guy who ends up volunteering to search for a missing child; a comedy about a guy trapped in a weekend professional development seminar run by a New Age Cult ... honestly, the list goes on and on and on and ooooon. So, for me, writer's block isn't about fear of the blank page. It's about the knowledge that I'll never be able to cultivate all my potential novels, plays, screenplays and other high-minded concepts to fruition. Which puts me right where my teenage narrator was in Agoraphobia, frozen by the revelation that I am cursed with limitless possibilities in a very limited life.