Lie about the block

‘Hey, are you writing for the new prompt ‘The Lie’?’ I saw the WhatsApp notification and didn’t bother to open the chat. I wanted to write, but I can’t write just for the sake of writing for this new prompt. Whenever this type of thought troubles me, I think of the reason why I first started writing. Oh, she was too beautiful to be the reason why I started writing.

‘This is a beautiful love story. Just work on the sentence construction.’ This was her comment on the first story. Out of all the things she corrected my grammar. In retrospect, I think a guitar would have worked better.

Well, my Muse changed, the story genre changed too. Friends praised the idea and I wrote more for the praises. It was all going good and then one day someone asked me to write a story and I couldn’t. I wanted to but something from within restricted me.

‘Ohh, it’s just a phase. Writer’s block maybe’, she said. Yeah, later on stories worked better than guitar. We started talking and she introduced to me this super amazing, yet disturbing phenomenon called Writer’s block.

‘You know how much I wanted to write for this genre, but I am afraid that this time I can’t write. It’s this phase you know, right?’ I remember, I said this to someone once and I was consoled for the same. Amazing, isn’t it?

By that time, we had a problem at hand and Google offered me solutions. Some of them worked too. One of them suggested reading when you can’t write and, in this case, I followed the advice. I opened my favorite Facebook page to read and all I could see was short stories related to the same prompt. I shut down everything and opened the Word file.

For a straight twenty minutes, I was staring at the blank screen like I used to stare at walls during my exams. I thought of all the lies that I used to believe to be true. It started from the brotherhood of Undertaker & Kane and ended on the real meaning of ‘Hmmm’ which she used to write a lot. It was never said in agreement. I concluded that ‘Dogs won’t do any harm if they are wiggling their tales’ and ‘Life is all chill after graduation’ are two of the worst lies. I thought of the hundred lies that I used to believe to be true but couldn’t weave a story around even one of them.

 They were not wrong when they say things about the Writer’s block. There is one good thing though. You can blame it i.e., writer’s block every time someone questions your creativity.

 After wasting an hour, I concluded that I need to get out of this phase first to write a kickass story. A story of a writer trying to write a story of a writer who fails to write, and the title would be ‘Lie about the block’

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Photo By: Daniel Mccollough

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