Writer's block

I am in desperate need of something to break my writer's block. I have too many projects to do, and honestly, one of them is no longer holding any interest for me. Naturally that's the one project that I promised to someone else. It might even be that the promise is the reason the interest has faded. I can be very contrary that way.

When I think about writer's block, I see it as a physical thing, a literal block of marble blocking the path I'm trying to follow. It's white and square and taller than I am, and it's waiting for Michelangelo to come and create a new David, or for Auguste Rodin to make a man who's finished thinking and is ready to act. My problem is that I have no hammer, no chisel, and no talent for making something out of a blank hunk of solid nothing. The only nothing that I can create is made of air and breath and scattered thought, and the marble in my path makes the air jetties swirl away, carrying the fragments of words and atoms of plot to places that I can't reach.

I can write about not being able to write, it seems; it's too bad that isn't what I'm supposed to be writing.

It might be time to take all of those projects and introduce them to the shelf for a while, to noodle away at something completely unrelated until the juices start to flow and I'm ready to take on my tasks again.

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