Lately, I’ve been writing a lot more, whether here in my blog or in other more structured ventures. I grew up hating to read, and therefore, I had atrocious writing. Let me correct myself - I still have an atrocious writing style. But that’s what compels me to continue at it. I mean.. it can’t truly get any worse, can it? Or maybe this will be me forever fighting a losing battle for my insatiable penchant for personal development against the entity of language coupled with thought and structure. Yes, that is me trying to sound smart, though further highlighting the atrocity that is my writing.

I grew quite fond of the multifaceted concept of storytelling my freshman year back in college. There is an elegance to the art of conveying a story in free prose, technical manuals, film, music, comedy, etc. Ultimately though, those stories cannot come to life without the words being written down onto the page, a large struggle to cope with for most. The advice writers will give to help you ease the struggle will vary drastically due to the personal perspectives to learning and approaching the craft for each writer. However, what every writer can agree on is:

There will come a time where that blank page and blinking cursor will taunt you and your outright inability to get anything down in the moment.

This is exactly how I’ve looked in the past couple of days internally screaming at a script I’ve been tackling with.

You want to throw the towel in and just punch your notepad or laptop for making you feel inadequate. But then, the truth always finds it way back to those very fingertips that were once raging, no boiling, at the enemy; we live and breathe the craft, having to manage this healthy obsession for getting the story down with the humbling skill that is writing. More on that to come later.

One analogy I like to compare this love/hate relationship between the writer and writing to is boxing. There is a give and take in the ring between you and the opponent similar to that between a writer and the page in front of him/her:

• Some rounds, you absolutely kill the very life out of your opponent, similar to those days where writing just oozes out of you in flow state for hours on end

• Other rounds, you have a back and forth dance trading jabs here and there with your opponent, similar to those days where the ideas will come in discrete spurts

• And then there are the brutal rounds where you get the living s**t beaten out of you, quite similar to those days that I’ve experienced where the page says “You suck!”

• Last, and hopefully not the case for me or anyone else out there at any point, there are the killer, in some ways literal, rounds where you get KO’d and say that you are quitting writing

It’s a hell of an emotional rollercoaster once you get at it. The underlying force that is there though is the undying emotional impetus to bring a story to life. There is an inexplicable feeling once a writer reaches flow state. It’s hard to capture, but in short:

Writing is a release into the depths of our inner feelings.

I don’t want to get too meta about it, but the process and journey of writing is in itself another story waiting to be written about. The funny thing is that the writer there will go through the exact same trials and tribulations in writing about it - just ask me as I struggle to write this in the wee hours of a Sunday night/Monday morning. I digress. Silly what the imagination can do to you when you try to focus.

But that is exactly it:

Imaginative thoughts need to reach the page, yet they must compel the audience.

This is where things get tricky with writing. The imagination is the gateway to stories, at least original stories. The issue is that our imaginations are scattered thoughts that have little to no cohesion in their original forms. Structuring thoughts is where the ultimate struggle stems, at least for me. There are a million and one different ideas and scenarios that play out in your head, but the structure to bring understanding and empathy from an audience for the characters, plot, substance, etc. is outright hard and increasingly more difficult the longer the work (much respect to established novelists out there).

Sometimes, the story becomes stale and that’s because you’ve coddled it for too long. You start nitpicking at every little word and sentence structure to see if there is a way to tweak the story to be conveyed clearer. Or even worse, the story starts generating little to no excitement in you anymore. It’s a tricky space reaching that point of, what seems like, no return.

Something I’ve more recently likened handling that point to is working out. As I mentioned earlier, writing ultimately is a skill that needs to be built up like your muscles and endurance through progressive overload. As time passes, increase your capability to write by writing just a tad bit more as consistently as you can. It could be as little as a sentence to a couple of pages. Like with working out, however, you need to give yourself rest and variety. The same workout routine gets boring after doing it for such a long time; the same can apply to writing, especially for me. I like switching back and forth between writing types and genres to keep the juices and “writing muscle”, if you will, turning and growing respectively.

If all else fails, remember that we are all writers waiting to have the story be read, even if it is by only one person. Take that and learn from the infinite knowledge base out in the world by reading other writers. Go experience new and foreign things out there in the world. There is always something you can draw upon once you hit that writer’s block to get you back on track. Take it as slow as you need to, but this is our genetic makeup. It’s something we just have to do.