writer’s block – don't confuse the narrator

bars, boards & blocks

It sees to be a long time since I wrote something new. In early 2020, when the pandemic first started, I wrote a number of new poems, inspired by new lockdown habits and experiences. Then my friend Lucía asked for my assistance with prayer writing and the Modern Pagan Prayers project was started.

There are three books in the series, now – a total of nearly 100 prayers, most of them completely new, with just a handful repurposed from poems I had written previously. There were also a handful of pieces that were rejected as they were too much like poetry and too little like prayer. An average of around two new pieces a week is definitely not something to be ashamed of.
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butterfly thoughts & mindful musings

I’ve been recording the videos for a new online writing course with the working title “Creative Inspirations”. The course was born from the fact that, at some time in their life, almost every writer looks at a blank screen or a blank page and realises they don’t know how to get started.

For me, this happens quite regularly. Indeed, I could say it happens almost every weekend when it’s time to write a blog post. Sadly, although each class in the course will provide a new activity or insight to trigger ideas, I’m not sure it’s what I need for writing here; I do, however, hope it will be of use to other writers and poets who have hit a bit of a wall.
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the blank page

So many ideas tangled together.

Try and track them as they bifurcate, diverge… Others interrupt, approaching from a different, contradictory perspective. Some are brighter, some less so. Some are more established, carry more weight; others taper into nothing. Impossible to keep track of all of them.

So many thoughts and ideas. So many blank pages.

intentionally left blank

Wondering what to write – and, indeed, wondering whether I actually would manage to get whatever I wrote posted as the phone company have let me down – I remembered the “Thing That Must Not Happen” as described in Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise:

Now, when you see in a newspaper a blank white space, bearing the legend: “THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR SO-AND-SO LTD.,” it may mean nothing very much to you, but to those who know anything of the working of advertising agencies, those words carry the ultimate, ignominious brand of incompetency and failure. So-and-so’s agents have fallen down on their job; nothing can be alleged in mitigation. It is the Thing That Must Not Happen.

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