Right Block

"Yay!" I exclaimed. A 52-week writing challenge! That would keep me writing the whole year! Interesting, though not much of a challenge, I told my husband. "It’s just a story a week. Tomorrow morning, I'll write out my first story and post it. Shouldn't take half an hour. And by evening, I may even have written stories for another three or four weeks," I boasted.

Came the morning and I woke up with a smile and a sense of readiness. Everything went on well like clockwork. No frustrating delays in plans, no untoward problems to irritate my creative mind, no… Oh, well, everything was fine. All my duties attended to, I sat down at my desk with a zesty positiveness and opened the laptop screen with a flourish.

And everything went blank.

A writer’s block is not an uncommon occurrence, but I didn't expect it to come upon me just this morning. Not after my bragging of last evening. It was so embarrassing. How could things change just like that?

I must have sat for at least half an hour, staring at the blackness in front of me, and I don’t mean just the unused screen. But no illuminated light bulb appeared over my head. So I pushed myself to the next step, that is, I switched on the power and allowed the computer to start. Did I think the start-up process would set off a train of connected words in my brain? Because if I did have such a perception, I was wrong. The laptop monitor flickered to life, not my brain.

My husband pointed out that I hadn’t yet opened a word document, so how could I expect the words to flow? I wanted to tell him that he was not a writer, he would never know. But I kept my words to myself and proceeded to take his advice. I went to the start menu and sought out Microsoft Word.

A little walk in the house, some biscuits and chips, a few swigs of water, a couple of washroom visits, and three phone calls later, the word document was as spotlessly white as it had been when I had opened it two hours earlier.

Trepidation now replaced the zealousness of the morning. To calm my nerves, I directed the cursor to ‘Games’ to solicit solace in ‘Solitaire’. A couple of games and I was sure to get the impetus.

By lunch time, I had lost count of how many games of ‘Solitaire’ and ‘FreeCell’ I had played. While my family ate with relish the sumptuous meal I had cooked for them, for me it was a spaced-out affair. Resuming my position after the meal, I found I couldn’t concentrate. My eyes were getting heavy with tiredness and boredom and it was quite a battle keeping them from drooping. But when I almost met the keyboard head-on, my husband decided it was time he stepped in to exhort me to release the laptop from captivity.

I relented, but only because I thought a power nap would do the trick. “Five minutes and I’ll be back,” I proclaimed. Two hours later, I woke up sheepishly, though refreshed. My husband was too much of a gentleman; he did not snigger at the brevity of my sleep.

The renewed energy however, failed to produce anything concrete. My fingers hovered over the keyboard without touching any key. I just didn’t know where to start, how to get going.

More little walks, more biscuits and chips, more swigs of water, more washroom visits, more phone calls, and a very rejuvenating coffee later, I realised that my verbosity did not intend to come out of its hiding. At least not today.

Accepting defeat, I moved away from the computer and settled down with a book. Hopefully, next week’s is a better story.