How I Learned to Write Again
There is something ominous about a cursor blinking on a blank page. That blinking causes my mind to freeze. Writer’s block. It’s like a dam in my mind that prevents all the ideas I have from jumping onto the page. I know what I want to write about. I just can’t figure out what order the words need to be placed. That blinking cursor causes the words to stick in my mind’s eye. The words try to crawl out of my head, but something happens on their trip down my arm to my anxiously poised finger tips. I don't know if the words get lost somewhere along the way or simply refuse to comply with the orders my brain is sending, but the result is the same. A blank page.
Thankfully, I have found a bit of a work around. Analog writing. Yep, good ol’ fashioned pen and paper. Something about the tactile nature of pen and paper, for me at least, just lets the words flow. My pen flies, where the keys stay lifeless. Immobile.
I first noticed this a few months ago when I sat down to work on a short story for an online magazine. My story wasn’t selected for publication, but the analog writing process worked. The words flowed so much easier from my brain to my pen than they do from my brain to my keyboard. I don’t know why I decided to write manually at that time, but it tickled something in my brain that I promptly forgot about until a week ago.
I have spent the past week manually writing future blog posts on paper. Some may call that journaling, but it’s not. The intention is that I am writing for an audience. I now have five potential articles sitting in my notebook, including this one, that I edit as I type the handwritten draft into my computer.
I’ve not been feeling motivated to write anything for my blog or for Medium lately. I have managed to write two articles in the past few months, but they sit unpublished. Part of me thinks it is the topics: Leadership, Management, Public Service. The other part of me is realizing that analog writing really helps my writing process. It’s a pain to write by hand then transcribe to the computer, but it is working for me. I’m getting words on the page, and that’s all that matters.
I live leadership, management, and public service. I strive to be a good leader for my library team, community, and family, but honestly it is a damn boring topic to write about. It’s also quite difficult not to come across as a preachy know-it-all or God forbid a self proclaimed “thought leader” when writing about those topics.
I’m not saying I will never write about those subjects because “we write about the things that cause us anxiety.” I just need to find a new angle to approach them from. I also needed a new medium to write my ideas down in.
I write from my lived experience. I am a librarian, who also happens to be a leader. I need to lean into that more. Many people imagine that librarians sit around in cardigans, drinking hot tea, and reading books all day. I wish that were the case. I love a good sweater and hot tea (Tazo Passion with lemon and honey is ideal).
What truly happens is far more boring. Librarianship is more akin to a near endless stream of paperwork interspersed with patron interactions, program planning, and problem solving. I need to write about that. Leadership, like librarianship, is not a big one-and-done event. It’s not a stump speech or a grand gesture. Leadership is relational. It lives in thousands of tiny interpersonal interactions. Sometimes those interactions are messy, but we clean up the mess, learn from it, and keep going.
That’s a lot like writing. Start where the words come easiest. Build trust in the process, clean it up later, and keep showing up.
That way progress lies.