You probably all recognize this feeling: you sit in front of your computer, wanting to write something. It can be anything; a section of a report, a diary entry, an email to a teacher, a hard we-need-to-talk message to a friend, or some short form opinion piece. And yet, the text entry field stays empty; the cursor blinking, almost condescendingly, in your face.
Your mind wanders, and so do your eyes — a thousand yard stare out of the window follows. ‘Are those birds up there fighting or just playing?’ you wonder to yourself. You snap back to the screen; the cursor still blinking. The thoughts ‘Where do I even start?’, ‘what do I write about?’, ‘how do I even phrase this?’, and ‘I should really clean this mess one day’ cross your mind. ‘Oh yeah, voting pass — I should really pick someone to vote for.’ (Please do if you’re allowed to vote — remember, elections in a week!)
These feelings suck. In higher education, almost all of the fruits of our labour take the form of writing, but that doesn’t make it any easier. The deadlines still loom. Still, even though everyone’s writing skills differ, we’ve all dealt with writers’ block in some form. It happens so often that in Dutch we’ve invented a word for it: ‘inspiratieloosheid’, often used to complain to ones near us.
As an example, you think about you want to write, be it the global subject, or how to specifically phrase something. You come up with one idea, but discard it quickly after. ‘No, this subject is way too heavy again,’ ‘This is way too harsh,’ ‘reading it for a second time this makes no sense’ and so on. After repeating this a seemingly myriad of times, you turn to your friend, and say: ‘help, ik ben zo inspiratieloos!’
With nothing better to do, you go read other people’s work — of course feeling guilty about not writing. This can go two ways, either you feel like a massive impostor ‘how can these people put their feelings on paper so eloquently; compared to them I’m nothing,’ or ‘why did the teacher think this was a good example‽’ with absolutely nothing in between.
But eventually, the deadline looms even larger, so you power through; channeling your inspirationlessness — sometimes literally — onto the paper, while, for example, listening to Stromae’s new album for the nth time that day. Slowly but surely, the paper fills itself, almost like you never had writers’ block in the first place.
And no, this story is definitely not about me. Just writing for a friend.
