This scribe is sure it has happened to even avid readers amongst you from time to time, with reading. After thoroughly and effortlessly enjoying some four or five works of fiction or non-fiction back-to-back, suddenly you decide you need a break and press the `pause' button without thinking too much. Very often, after a week or fortnight, you are able to release the `pause' button and resume your reading without much ado. Almost as if the break was not there. But sometimes, even though you try the hardest, you are forced to prolong the shying-away from the `unappetising' idea of picking up another book for a few weeks, may be months, despite sustained efforts to even jump-start the process. Even if all the titles you impatiently waited to lay hands on are within reach and time is not a constraint at all. Pretty much like you are unable to stand the sight of your favourite dish made lovingly by the mother or the wife, leaving them bewildered as to what ails you! You lose the intensity for something which has been almost an obsession till recently and have seemingly developed a transient apathy, if not an aversion, to that task. And rationally you are unable to explain why that is happening, which further puzzles and distresses you. You are with me??
Of late, it has been my misfortune to experience this with writing. I have been posting a new title on this blog of mine once or twice a month for the past four years without any apparent difficulty - of course, not counting what the readers have silently suffered! I say `silently' only because they have been considerate and generous enough not to respond with vituperative criticism till now. However, since the last post a couple of months ago, I don't seem to be able to write one full sentence without stumbling or choking on alternate words. And when the realisation dawns that the resultant wonder-sentence, the product of that fretful and laborious process through intermittent sittings over a few hours, seems to make even lesser sense than usual, I promptly undo that nugget. I hastily abandon any further attempt at writing for the foreseeable future (but I must confess, the temptation to revisit writing lingers all the time) and withdraw into my cocoon of despair for a while. Wondering how it has come to such a pass that - recalling a spontaneous scribble I shared with my MA classmates when a rather bumbling professor came to our class the first time - I probably might deliver a child more easily than a reasonably well-written blog-post. That the professor wrongfully ejected my friend and neighbour from the class, mistaking the latter's uncontrolled laughter as an insulting response to some part of his own lecture and I escaped unscathed is another matter. In the two month hiatus, there has been no dearth of topics I have tried to write on, but regardless of the subject matter, the result has been pretty much identical after all efforts -- nothing to show except a leering, taunting, blank!! My dear wife is all sympathy and reassurance, but right now she is not being Muse enough!!
Now, if a small, part-time scribe like me is derailed so badly by this hurdle, being left with an awful feeling as a consequence, how do big-time authors, who are used to publishing frequently, handle such a blow? Here I am, sniffling about my inability to churn out a couple of pages on any subject on the earth required for a blog-post, without having to bother about characters, their inter-play, emotional peaks and troughs, a denouement and climax. But famous, prolific authors who are used to serially reeling out three to four hundred page novels replete with all the above, have a monumentally onerous task of pushing a huge boulder uphill and over to safety in a similar situation. How do they cope with this enervating disease called the writer's block? They too have confessed to being afflicted by this pestilence among writers from time to time and they seem to rebound after a period of abstinence from writing, engaged with other facets of life which catch their fancy. Come to think of it, golfers and tennis players do that too, vanishing from their profession temporarily when their form plummets inexplicably. So, there has to be some solution in due course, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, so long as one not give up.
At this juncture, I see myself as a recuperating patient, who has had the wind taken out of him by a debilitating blow which he never saw coming and never felt until he was flat on the ground. I realise I cannot even pretend to do as I please, simply because I don't seem to have the reserve required for that kind of bravado! Then it struck me that I could probably use my state of distress to fill a few paras and make a post of that, just to break out of the rut! Here I am, unloading on you and rambling about my rather-not-so-serious travails. Some of you might have even heaved a sigh of relief that the monthly e-mail notification of a blog-post has been conspicuous by its absence for two months. Then I think of Jeffrey Archer, that amazing author of fabulous novels like Not A Penny More, No A Penny Less and A Matter of Honour, who continued to write even from the oppressing confines of a jail, after copping a sentence for perjury. When `writing' is a passion, it comes out an overwhelming winner even against all odds, I guess, of course granting that the quality might be indifferent to tolerable with most writers, at best! But then, Archer had millions beckoning him for his pains and I distinctly lack that kind of motivation as well as that guaranteed prize at the end of the rainbow. I am still waiting at the lowest rung, looking up at him, for I am fully congnizant of the huge chasm in the levels of writing. I may have the writer's block, but am not labouring under any delusion, you see!!
