April 20, 2011

Life on the Couch: Creative constipation.

I think there’s little in the world as frustrating to me as wanting to create and being unable.

I’m in one of those horrid blank spots right now, the place where I have all these half-formed ideas swirling around in the strange ether of my brain. Ideas that mock and tease and flit away the moment I try to reach out and grab hold.

I’ve always written, ever since I was old enough to string together sentences. Stories, tales of my life, essays, journals, even the odd poem or song. I’m lucky I’ve always enjoyed writing, because it was the only form of creative outlet I had for most of my life. About four years ago I also discovered that I have some talent for vidding (if you don’t know what that is, go here and click play on pretty much anything, you'll get the idea), which gave me a whole new and fabulous way to express myself. I've even dabbled in graphic art in the form of icons and banners for various online communities.

In the past year or so I've been writing a lot, most of it in the form of fan-fiction for "Alles Was Zählt," the German soap opera I blabbed about in a previous post. It's been exhilarating, getting to flex that muscle again after not writing much in the past three years. Maybe it was getting feedback from my beta writer and the others in the fandom who read my stories, or maybe it was just getting a chance to let my imagination out of my head, but it was the kind of writing that seemed to happen without any effort on my part. The best kind of writing.

I've done very little vidding in the last 18 months or so, and none at all lately. I don’t know if it was related to the increase in writing, or if I simply reached some sort of (hopefully temporary) plateau with the vidding. All I know is that line of expression seems to have been cut off. The graphic design thing never really took off, and I've done none at all in the past few months. The worst part is that whatever momentum I'd built up in terms of writing seems to have come to a crashing halt since the new year. Now all I can do is stare at all the half-finished fics and just shake my head.

I got nothin'.

This constipation of the brain has even overtaken my blogging, which is evidenced by the fact that I can't get a post up on time anymore. This one was originally meant to be about my trip to Europe in May, but all I could come up with was "I'm going to Europe in May. Woo."

I don't know the cause of this particular blockage, but I can only hope it's temporary. I'm in desperate need of some inspiration to get me through. Right now all I can do is shake and tremble at the idea of starting school in the Fall and being completely unable to write anything.

Hopefully plugging away at the blog will help by forcing me to keep flexing the muscle. I'll keep trying to post on time, but I imagine Life Sundays will soon permanently morph into Life Wednesdays while Geek Thursdays become Geek Saturdays. Eventually it'll probably come back around to where it's supposed to be though. I'm cool like that.

4 comments:

  1. Maybe you should just call your blog "Life Weekly," then you can post whatever day you want to. I'd love to hear about your trip to Europe, especially since it seems a good number of people are doing Berlin this summer. But I imagine that there's really not much to say about a trip until you're on that journey.

    As a side note, I love those fics you had written with DeRoMarc a couple or so years into the future when Deniz and Roman meet again in Paris, I think. That's not to put pressure on you to finish that series, but just wanted to say that it may have been one of the first DeRo fan fics I read when I first started watching EPK clips last year, and I thought they were wonderful.

    I'm not sure this post is in any way helpful, but I've read this blog before and just wanted to say Hi.

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  2. @violashipwrecked: Thanks for the writing encouragement! I'm desperate to finish that one, but the boys have fallen silent. Perhaps they're as horrified by the current "plot" as everyone else. Maybe they'll perk up again soon.

    As for the rest, I'm taking your suggestions under advisement. And there will be (a) massive post(s) before/during/after the trip. Because ZOMG YAY!

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  3. As your beta, I insist that you start writing again so I can go back to pretending that I'm a big shot copy-editor ;P
    Just watch something pretty (or at least porny!) and try to get inspired

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