Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to realise something. I can’t write properly in February. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the unremittingly grim weather. Maybe the cold atrophies the bit of my brain that strings all the words together. There’s a frozen blockage in my brainpipes that I can’t get through. Every time I try to write something (and this includes blog postings), the words come out all twisted and mangled and broken, and I’m stuck with bad grammar and clumsy phrasing and poorly-selected adjectives, and I struggle to get the pictures in my head out onto the page.
It’s driving me crazy. Mostly because I’m one of those people who actually enjoys the process of writing. A lot of writers hate it. Not me. I like all the research and thinking and wondering and toying with words. Welding together disparate ideas. Solving problems. I love the moment when I can take the stabilisers off the wobbly sentences and watch them sail away confidently, like a proud parent shepherding the malformed offerings and turning them into independent entities that I can hurl out into the world.
Writing this is just another attempt at blasting through the blockage. Let’s hope it worked.
3 comments:
I could be a complete bastard and whinge about your mixing of bicycle and sailboat metaphors, but I won't go there. Not even by implication.
All I write these days is e-mails and comments. I aspire to be as blocked as you.
Ah, but when you do write, it's like a happy day out gold-prospecting. Sifting through the pan, there's always something glinting in the sunlight.
I think in pictures, too.. and only recently realized that not all people do.. thank God for words, then, right? Well.. not many people have accurate definitions in their head either, which is a constant source of misunderstandings.
February.. it's a short month.. too much pressure to perform, maybe?
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