Writer’s block? I don’t think so! (Dang, this €178 Homey the Clown t-shirt is sold out but I would totally buy it with my Substack earnings-to-date if it were available! IYKYK, but if you don’t, do yourselves a favor AFTER you write today and Google Homey.)

I will not go down an In Living Color rabbit hole. I will not go down an In Loving Color rabbit hole. I will not. I will write this post because it is June 1 and I’m introducing a new element on Creative Passages, as promised.

So… so-called “writer’s block.”

What I am experiencing when I’ve been cruising right along, ink flowing page-after-page and then BOOM, my brain goes blank; or, when I open up my stylin’ new season paper journal and uncap my happy grass-green LAMY pen but then can do nothing more than chomp on said pen like a cigar and fake-smoke, and stare, and then growl and stare some more, is not writer’s block, it’s writer’s annoyance.

What is writer-me annoyed with? I’m annoyed with the sound of my own voice, and this is the case even if I’m writing a fictional character who is not me and does not have my voice. Or, I’m annoyed with the fact I can’t find the tiniest seed of one single original, interesting, or compelling idea.

Writer’s annoyance—it becomes a thing, a thing that takes on the dangerous form of the fake smoke I fake-exhale when I’m chewing on my pretty pen to relieve the stress of not knowing where to begin or go next with words.

Writer’s annoyance takes advantage, wafting and curling with its mean, gross, dull little energies, straight into my inner critic’s nostrils. The inner critic, as you know, is always holding its nose high in the air, which helps it maintain its false sense of superiority while simultaneously rendering it subject to toxicities of all kinds.

And like how it is with jerks and other shitty people, the kind that come to mind when someone we love, admire, or respect has died and we go, “Why them and not the jerks and shitty people?” well, the damn inner critic keeps on keeping on like the Energizer Bunny, coming for us when our hand is hovering over a scene or when we cannot stop blankly observing the parade of people walking past our outdoor café table while we kick ourselves for not being able to read them and inventing the story of where they came from, where they are going. Whether they just had the best afternoon sex of their lives or were told they have stage 4 breast cancer, we don’t know. Everything is indecipherable. We’ve been locked out. We are numb and dumb and out of touch with the human condition, we think, so our head fills:

“You are a boring, talentless wannabe and everything you want to say has been written 1,000,000 times already by brilliant people, so give up because you aren’t one of them.”

Or …

“Why are you wasting your time trying to build another world, craft wickedly lovely sentences, and introduce complicated, warm-blooded characters when all anyone wants now is to micro-dose on dopamine that is delivered in sensationalized, easy to swallow platitudes about “authenticity” and other “live, laugh, love” psychobabblings? Just post your cute dog running near the sea with his bestie-dog-fwen and envision the swag you’ll make millions from after the boys go viral.”

Mmmmhph!

Yeah, writer’s annoyance can be deadly, but what if we pause and see it for what it is: a sign. Be Zen with it! Treat it like a living, breathing thing that you would recognize as temporary, trifling, and not cool, then rise from your desk (or wherever you have dedicated space to your imagination) and excuse yourself.

Stepping away or back from your work, you will alleviate the pressure, gain perspective, stumble upon a new angle, and stop overthinking.

Stop. Overthinking. It kills your writing and besides, not-knowing, usually, is why most of us are writing in the first place, isn’t it?

I’m talking to myself here, advising myself, reminding myself. Writers have a thousand ways to reboot themselves, and one writer’s way or habits is not another’s. But what I have found fun and helpful when I am at a loss for words, is to take a visual prompt and run with it. This prompt may or may not have anything to do with a piece I’m working on, or might not seem to at first. It may eventually whisper and weave its way into it an existing body, or not. This prompt may fuel me for one page, or ten. This prompt may launch a story I could not seen coming. The point is, I find an image, sit with it for as short a time as possible, then write loose and without parameters or expectations.

When I lose trust or flow in my writing and writer’s annoyance starts to cheer that bad vibe on, I do the usual things—go for a walk, have coffee with a friend, or sketch with my colored pencils (sketching is an art form I have never studied and have zero skills in, therefore I do it with no other goal beyond pleasure and freedom). I also soak my eyeballs in eye candy.

My intention of providing weekly ekphrastic prompts on Creative Passages is to keep myself writing into one for myself weekly and to hopefully nudge anyone struggling with writer’s annoyance past the pause, fret, and doubt. These prompts are nothing more than a possibility (which means they are also anything and everything) and you don’t even have to come to them annoyed… come open, curious, giddy, and inspired!

With these prompts, which for the time I’m calling Wayfinders, I hope you wander wherever you want. Maybe over time we will evolve and find a way to exchange and share what they spark, but for now, please just wander and write into wherever the spark takes you.

Wayfinders will be open to all subscribers the first week of June before being paywalled.

And here, out of so many images, is the first.

It’s June 1^st and the sun is finally shining on the island, but the photo I offer today is one I took a few weeks ago, when fog encased us and seemed as if it would never lift. I don’t plan to say much about the images I drop here, because I like the idea of anyone who wants to “use” them starting with a blank slate, with nobody else’s words or ideas in mind. But this image represents a state that a couple of my closest friends and I are in right now, so I’m going for it.

We were just walking along in this life when a barb on the wire—a boundary marker—snagged us. This cold thin line and a twist of it—between life and death; togetherness and separation; business and friendship— stopped us in our tracks, pierced us where we were vulnerable, forced us to face our fragility. We can lick the wound and squeeze the flesh all we want, but beyond, the mush of the landscape we have to enter awaits.

And we know the landscape. We traversed it when the skies were blue and clear, but now what? How do we feel our way—crawling, grasping, howling, cursing, and trembling—how do we survive into this space while keeping the faith that eventually all fog lifts and recedes, carrying off the tears we’ve released with and for each other?

It’s one thing to tell someone to be Zen on the ledge, it’s another to be it.

Okay then, okay. Like I’ve been saying to myself for months (or years) now to self-soothe and hopefully make it real: It will all be okay. Remember that fog is soft and when it is so thick you can’t see your own hand in front of you, you are free, so run bare-ass naked, bop someone who deserves it in the head with a tennis ball in a sock like Homey the clown because they won’t know what hit them, and dare I say it, dance like nobody is watching. Fog absorbs sound too, or at least that’s my theory, so scream into it.

However you work your way around known markers and the ones you discover in the fog with newly necessitated and realized senses, may you find your way through.