Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Why I Don't Write pt 1

I've said it before and I will continue to say it into the future.

Writer's block doesn't exist.

Writer's block is a myth, a lie, a comforting fabrication. We writers like to discuss writer's block as though it's a disease - it strikes anybody, amateur and professional alike, at any time, in any place and we seek cures for it. How can we overcome writer's block and start writing? Or perhaps we just have to wait it out, like the common cold, until we can start work again. Just hope we don't end up like those poor souls who suffer writer's block for months, even years, on end.

Except none of it's true. There is no writer's block. It is, at best, a shared delusion and, at worst, an excuse to be lazy.

But I've said all this before. So let's say something different.

I don't get writer's block but sometimes I stop writing for long periods of time. There's plenty of reasons and I'm going to talk about a few of them, starting with the least worthy of reasons.

Television.

Fun fact: I stopped watching TV for a long time. Around the time Nickelodeon stopped making surreal, creative and interesting cartoons like Invader Zim, The Angry Beavers, and Kablam (except for Spongebob. Spongebob is still going and is the bomb) and began making sit-coms about pre-teens, TV lost its appeal to me. The nice thing about watching movies is that they can be consumed in 3 hours, tops, and then you're free to do other things. Movies are enjoyable bite sized entertainment for a relaxing afternoon.

But then something unusual happened. DC Comics decided to change its business model. It launched the New 52 line of crap comics, began planning a whole shared cinematic universe of awful movies and focused all its effort and quality on TV shows. They began by taking my favourite super hero, The Green Arrow, and giving him a hot new TV series that is in every way amazeballs (amazeballs is the industry term.)

I suddenly had a very good reason to watch TV again and while one TV show might be only 40 minutes, unlike movies, they just keep making more and soon you're watching 14 hours just to get to the end of the story.

I don't think anyone is upset that TV suddenly became good again, this decade, and there's now dozens of high quality serial dramas around and whether you like fantasy, sci-fi, politics, history, there's something for everyone on the idiot box.

And services like Netflix make it easier than ever to watch it all at once. It's easy as pie to lose a whole day binging on your favourite TV show about really sad cute guys with daddy issues trying to save the world.

Writing is work. It's fun work and I enjoy it, but it's also work and it can be hard and you can spend all day writing something, look over and say "Well that was crap" and feel defeated and then you find out The Flash is almost as great as Arrow and now you need to catch up on that.

So sometimes I don't feel like writing, I don't even want to write, I just want to watch more Arrow. Then I might run out of Arrow, sit down to write and I can't focus on writing because at the back of my mind I'm still thrilling over the season finale and I know that Legends of Tomorrow is probably just as great and I should give that a chance, too.

And that can sure feel like writer's block. That can feel like I can't write when, really, I don't want to write, I want to watch move TV and, folks, there's a lot of TV to watch.

Kevin Smith called this Writer's Laze and his poison of choice was Dora The Explorer.

Fortunately, TV is a pretty easy addiction to break. Even if you're not interested in breaking it, even if you still want to watch every new season of Supernatural (and why wouldn't you?) it's generally pretty easy to get away from a TV.

Want to write without the temptation of great serial drama to pull you away? Take your writing tools of choice - laptop, pen and paper, stone and chisel - and go to a park, a library, a cafe and get to work. I've done a lot of writing, some of my best writing, at my local library where the wifi is so slow even checking dictionairy.com is a pain and I'd rather write now and look up words later. It's not just an environment lacking easy distracting, it's an environment made for quiet work. It's also cheaper than a library.

I said that a crippling addiction to superhero TV shows is a poor reason not to write, but it's an honest reason. I have no doubt that many cases of Writer's Block are similarly a simple case of "I'd rather do this other fun thing today."

Not all of them, of course. There are far more sympathetic reasons writing might be difficult for you. They're still not this mystical unstoppable writer's block, but they are what we'll talk about next time...