Writer's block, that dreaded
feeling you get when the words simply won't flow. When your creative juices run
dry and you have imagination constipation. When what once defined you as a
writer; the innate ability to pull words out of the ether, slap them around
like an obstinate scullery maid and then position them where you want, is gone.
Vanished.
Poof.
Buh-bye.
My moral malaise has only grown
over these past few months. I'm experiencing a crisis of faith.
Faith in my abilities as a journalist
to get stories people want to read. I'm just not engrossed in my profession
anymore. Every story seems to blend into the other, like an amorphous blob of
raw sewerage. A bulk of what I write professionally is about buildings and
structures. It's about zoning and who can put what duplex where. In the
aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (I refuse to use that idiotic moniker 'superstorm'
anymore because, well, the media's retarded) most of the stories involve
advisory base flood elevation maps and building height. Important topics, to be
sure, but they don't excite me.
Trying to get a writer to write
about something that doesn't excite him is like trying to get a kid to eat his
vegetables, except the vegetables are rotten and teeming with plump maggots.
It takes every ounce of energy for
me not to fall asleep at the keyboard anymore.
The competition is writing in-depth
stories about building height, zoning ordinances and planning. The ins and outs
and nitty-gritty details of why and how homeowners can elevate their homes to
lower their flood insurance premiums and not have tidal waves roar through
their living rooms.
Maybe I've soured on Sandy coverage
because it affected me more than other reporters. I had to move out because of
a foot of water in my apartment, a foot of water that obliterated my furniture,
books, DVDs, clothes and other possessions.
How can I get excited in a job
where I haven't had a pay raise in six years or a promotion in ten?
Where my opinions and concerns go unheard and
where my sources are drying up faster than Jane Fonda's tits?
Where I do hit my stride is reporting
local history. Pouring through moldering tomes of newspapers, researching
historic events and personages long dead is, for me, engaging and fun. So far,
I've chronicled Prohibition, World War II and World War I and a northeast storm
of 1962. I'm currently working on the 19th Amendment and how the local fight
for women's suffrage.
Part of me (the logical, rational
cardigan-wearing egghead in my brain) tells me it's only a job, just a way to
snag a paycheck and earn a living. When we distill our daily activities as only
a way to accumulate wealth, we're missing a vast part of the human experience.
America has a massive
Viagra-chugging hard-on for money and acquiring riches. Sure, we all want to
get paid for working, but when the quest is focused only on that and not using
your talents to give something back, we transform into the stereotypical
monocle-wearing misers sitting behind a pyramid of stacked gold coins.
I'm not saying my writing will cure
cancer or even be remembered or read a century from now, but I just want that
chance to create something that stands out, that's wholly unique.
Writing about height elevation or
building codes isn't wowing anybody except the people who are directly
affected.
For reporting to matter, it has to
affect more than just an immediate audience. It should broaden its scope and be
relevant to a wider readership. Why my career has stalled and fell into a
torpid mire is this: I've retread the same ground before, and endless loop of
interviewing the same officials about the same topics.
I need to unlearn all of the
slothful and slipshod habits and liberate myself from the conventional bonds
tethering me to the dungeon floor. Reporters should be obstinate assholes who
make officials nervous. They should be prodding, annoying gadflies buzzing
around the bloated corpses of government, sinking their malaria-filled stingers
into jaundiced flesh and tearing open the festering wounds of a teetering
oligarchy.
We should be revealing
uncomfortable truths and not just informing the public like some community
center corkboard thumbtacked with messages. We should be bold and take risks,
not dwell in fear and timidity.
Fact is, this city spends way too
much money on settling lawsuits. They've made an art of the pay-off instead of challenging
lawsuits in court, which would generate bad publicity. The last thing the
administration needs is bad publicity, probably because they're not too adroit
at defending the entrenched cronyism so prevalent in this town.
The reason for my lapse in devoting
every waking moment to good ol' fashioned journalism is I've been distracted.
I've been working on other projects
in my spare time, writings I hope I'll be known for instead of the mundane
weekly newspaper articles. Writers tell stories, and I have many to share. I'm
reticent in detailing exactly what I'm working on, but it's big and crosses a
few media platforms.
It's writing I can be proud of. My
unique perspective. My energy, talents and hard work birthed this 800-pound
juggernaut baby squirming like a happy pink squid, tentacles wiggling.
So I live two lives, inhabiting two
distinct personas. One, the daylight me, the Clark Kent moping around the
office and conducting daily interviews and pounding out columns like a Vicodin
zombie, is who the world sees. The second, Superman persona, the crazed,
angst-ridden comedian wrangling with hippogriffs and spitting out fiction, is
what I'm doing when nobody's watching. It's the true me, the writer I want to
be, the wordsmith whose Herculean efforts and persistence will one day
undoubtedly pay off.
Writing is hard.
Whoever doesn't believe that has
never struggled with writer's block.
My best material comes at
inopportune times, late at night or early in the morning. I began writing this
at 5:30 a.m. It's now 6:30 a.m. It took an hour to write 1,000 words. Think of
what a full day of doing this would bring? I'd hit 8,000 words in eight hours.
After a week, I'd have a novelette. Two to three weeks, a novel. I'd be an
unstoppable writing machine, an Optimus Prime of scribes.
Yet I'm a mere mortal, struggling
with the words, living two independently different writing lives. Mild-mannered
reporter by day, tortured genius by night. I see myself in some laboratory,
hunched over a keyboard, an array of bubbling flasks and a Jacob's ladder,
complete with a rising arc of high voltage in the background. A spark of
ingenuity, the insane writer completes his work, his back sore and stiff, his
vision blurred from the computer monitor's glare.
Triumphantly, he cackles, raises
one arm, his hand forming into a crooked claw and bellows, "It's alive!
It's aliiiivvveeee!"
