"I'm having difficulty writing right now."
"Well, you know the solution to that! Apply ass to chair in front of the keyboard and just write."Yes. I know how to write, thanks. The problem is that I seem to be experiencing difficulty doing it at the moment.
This is the equivalent of being told, when you're having difficulty walking, to:
"Just put one foot in front of the other!"
"Thanks. I'm familiar with the mechanics of walking, yes. I've been doing it since an early age, but what I'm trying to say is that I appear to be having difficulty doing it right now."And what chaps my ass is that the writing I do is the easiest, lowest, meanest sort. I don't need to come up with plots or characters or even story ideas. I don't need to have 80,000 words on an editor's desk in three months.
I write short little non-fiction columns and articles on dry technical matters, and I write them on request, rather than on speculation. All I need to do is spit out my opinion on the requested topic when my string is pulled, and I seem to be experiencing great difficulty doing that at the moment.
This is where some writer friend chimes in with "There's nothing special or creative about writing. It's just a job and you do it like any other job."
Hey, people find themselves unable to deal with their job...face burnout...all the frickin' time. I know people from accountants to auto mechanics to dentists who found themselves unable to deal with the thought of one more stuck spark plug or nasty cavity.
I don't think I'm burned out on writing, but it's like there's a magic force field around the MS Word icon on my desktop that manages to deflect my cursor someplace else, like Safari or Lightroom*, every time I get near it.
I'll bust out of this like I have every time before, but dammit, if you can't vent whinily on your own blog, where can you vent?
*And yes, before someone suggests it, my work computer doesn't even have games on it. I have a Mac mini desktop that only has MS Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and whatever bloatware came with this version of OS X. The games are on a Dell laptop that doesn't get booted up before 6PM.
