Writer's Block

I haven’t written much lately; my last blog post was in April. This is a hard spell to go through, as I feel that writing is my identity. Without it, my day feels useless and empty. It’s not that I haven’t written anything, I have wonderful clients that I write blogs and newsletters for, and I enjoy working with each of them and learning about their work and their passion for it. I also enjoy being paid for this writing. But it’s not my writing. It’s not my story I am telling.

It's not that I haven’t tried. I spent some time on a memoir about my mother, but soon realized there were too many years I did not spend with her, times she went through that I did not know enough about. I went back to a novel I started years ago, the story of a young woman hired to write the history of a three-generations old family winery in Napa Valley. But I just couldn’t land on the voice or visualize the setting. I’ve never made wine or lived in a vineyard, only visited. It’s not my lived experience. And then there is the fear, what if editors reject it, a publisher won’t pick it up, no one buys it?

When I taught composition at Arizona State University, I had my students identify 3 things at the top of their papers before they started an essay—Purpose, Voice, and Audience. Why are you writing this, what is your point of view, and who is your reader? Long form writing is a bit different from an academic essay, for example the setting and the arc of the story are also essential elements. But if you’ve ever read a novel that didn’t grab you, it was probably because one of these elements was missing or poorly executed. And if a book did take you in and make you feel like you were right there where it was happening, absent from your everyday life for a luxurious, or harrowing, or hilarious bit of time, those elements likely were there for you.

So now I am back to thinking. What is the next story I want to tell? Is it nonfiction, fiction, memoir? Is it shorter, time to move away from book length? Why tell it, who cares? Is it a young person from the time of my own childhood, or an adult building their life, or an older adult like myself, or all of these? Where does it happen? San Antonio, Austin, San Juan Island—places I know? And what is the story I want to share that would matter to others, others I don’t even know? How do I move past the fear and write for the pure Joy of it? I know these answers are in me somewhere, and I’ll keep looking. 

Because writing; it’s who I am.