An Excellent Writer

As you may have inferred from the two-week gap in my previous posts, I've once again been struggling with that infuriating lack of creative current better known as writer's block.  I can't tell you how many times I sat down at my iMac and arched my fingers over the keyboard, only to stand up minutes (sometimes hours) later and walk away from a blank screen in sheer frustration.

In the middle of my fifth or sixth attempt to lure out a quality narrative of Mr. Q's salubrious financial advice, Holly jumped into my lap uninvited and turned her nose toward the jumble of sentence fragments visible in the monitor. 

"I'm an excellent writer, you know."

"Oh yeah, Hol?  If only you had opposable thumbs?" 

"Nope.  That's got nothing to do with it," she said, slinking her way back to the floor.

"Well how can you be a writer without actually writing anything down?"

She shook her head.  "You focus on your hands way too much.  For me, it's all up here."

Since cats don't have the luxury of being able to point and gesture, I wasn't quite sure what "up here" meant.

"In your mind, you mean?" 

(A respectable guess, right?) 

"Nooooooo!"

(Apparently not.) 

"In my heart, silly.  That's where writing's supposed to come from.  Your mind and hands are just tools for translating it."

Writing from the heart?  Oh, if only it were that easy!  If only my heart hadn't for years bore the brunt of bullying by academics who insisted I didn't write academically enough or professionals who told me my writing was too academic. Perhaps then it wouldn't have bowed in submission to my brain and retreated behind the guise of solid grammar, correct spelling, and parallel structure.

My mind, in its superior rank, decided long ago that "good writing" and "perfection" were synonymous.  Seeking either is slow and arduous by default.  Painstakingly slow and arduous.

But by writing merely to not be wrong, my heart has no stakes in the process.  It remains fully protected while attacks and criticisms are wielded by my intellectual front-line.  Although they sting at times, they're nothing my ego can't quickly triage--often by tacitly reappointing myself to a post in the Language Police (I had a double major in English, you know).

And if my increasingly powerful mind/ego team is anywhere near as condescending toward myself as it is toward others, it's easy to see why my heart wouldn't dare come out of hiding.  I've created my own cruel and self-limiting monster, and she MUST be reined in before I stand any chance of taking Holly's advice to heart (pun intended).

How?

. . .

. . .

. . .

(I'll have to get back to you on that one.)