I love coloring books. It makes drawing so much easier for someone like me, who can only sort of doodle messily. But really, I’m not all that artistically inclined in the way of drawing, anyway. Sometimes I’ll feel like sketching a picture, but most of the time my urge is to write. If I have time on my hands, I write. If I don’t have time on my hands, I prioritize, ignore whatever doesn’t seem important, and make time to write. If I’m bored, lonely, sick, tired, stressed, hungry, etc., I write. There is only one thing that can stop me from writing. One thing in the entire world.
Writer’s block. A disease so evil writers around the world have come to fear it. It’s like a virus, something that has no cure, and you have to just sit around and wait it out. People prescribe coffee, and writing prompts, and things like that, but really, there’s nothing that can make you write if you’re stuck. And when I’m staring at a blank page, or at a blank piece of paper, I really wish there was something that could make me write. Something that could help me write.
I think somebody should invent a book. A connect-the-dots type of thing, if you will. A book that’s just instructions, just an outline for a story, and you just have to go along and fill in the scenes without having to come up with the order on your own. It would have helpful little instructions for each scene, like “In this scene, make your main character go back to the place where the story first started. Have him meet an old friend there and they talk about the last person your main character was in love with.” Or, “In this scene, make someone very close to the main character go missing.” Or “In this scene, make your main character fall into a fountain.” I don’t know. Just a scene-by-scene outline for a story you can write. I think it would make it a lot easier for us, when we’re sitting at our desks, thinking, “I have absolutely no way to move on from this scene and I don’t want to abandon this thing at 230 pages into it.”
Trust me. I know. So really, I’d love it if someone would write me a writer’s coloring book so that when I’m 230 pages into a book I’m not tearing my hair out with no idea what to write next. I’m sure every writer can relate. We all go through it at some point or another, and this is usually where paid authors who are really serious about their work get to pack up and go to some remote area or really cool location to get the creative juices flowing. But I’m not a paid author, and I’m still in high school, which means that I’m juggling homework, house work, and teenage drama all at the same time as writing, which means I’ve probably spilled a few creative juices somewhere. I have a couple friends who write as well, and whenever we start to talk about writing we all complain about how hard it is to write and live through high school at the same time. I think I should get a bumper sticker that says, “I’m quitting living to focus on writing.” I think that bumper sticker would be wildly popular. Actually, I think it would be more popular if it just said, “I’m quitting living to focus on—–” and leave a blank space to write your passion down. Because I think everyone feels that way sometimes. Like life is so full of all this other random junk that you’ll probably never use, like graphing polynomial functions and dissecting frogs and finding how many moles of CuSO4 you need to put into 8 Liters of H2O to get a solution that has a molarity of .9, when really all you want to be doing is what you love. If you’re going to be a musician do you honestly need to know how to find the x intercepts of a parabola? It escapes me how this is necessary to everyone, but teachers certainly seem to think it is. But I’ve gotten off track now.
Really, what I meant to say was, I’d love it if someone could invent an easy way out for me. Except as I typed this entry, I realized how lazy that sounds. And I honestly didn’t mean to turn this into a prophetic article, but I suddenly realized something. There’s a lot of value in writer’s block. It really bonds you to other writers. There’s nothing more fun than going up to a group of your writing friends and saying, “I HATE writer’s block,” and suddenly you have everyone’s attention as the entire group goes, “Oh, I KNOW.” Everyone starts commiserating and sharing stories, and it generally turns pretty funny.
It’s something that’s understood the world around, and not just in writing. Everyone knows what it’s like to be staring down an obstacle. And I guess I don’t want the easy way out. If I’m going to write a book I want it to be made up of the “blood and sweat and tears” that went into it. People don’t say, “No guts, no glory” for no reason. There’s a little bit of a price, a little bit of pain, in every good thing you’re going to do. So the moral of the story? Forget coloring books. I’m never coloring in anyone else’s lines again.
Ok haha guys this really was a completely random post. But it’s me here, so what can you expect?
-Jeavoi
EurOK 