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Writer’s Block Turns Commercial?
By Deb Gallardo
If you attend writers’ conferences, bemoan the bullying you get from your inner critic, or get frustrated with your marginally-reliable muse, you may be interested in a site that sells T-shirts with humorous sentiments on these and related topics. Find “writerly” T-Shirts at pickledpixeltoe’s site.
I’m devoting an article to this subject because it occurs to me that the creative individual who thought these up was probably working on something else – maybe blocked at the time. And then a sense of humor kicked in, maybe in the middle of a writers’ conference, and creativity went into overdrive.
Often when we least expect it, something – call it muse, inspiration, or divine intervention – causes creative ideas to flow through our brain. You know what I’m talking about. Often these thoughts are not related to anything else you’re working on. Suddenly you get a snippet of an idea. If you DON’T stop right that moment and either jot down enough information to help you remember it, or better still start playing around with the idea immediately, you’ll lose it. Trust me, I know this from experience.
And often, the times I’ve made notes and come back to them, the inspiration was gone. It’s as though these “out of the blue” ideas have a short half-life (see wikipedia.org/half-life) and then they evaporate. Do these ideas then go out into the cosmos seeking another receptive mind? Or are they lost forever?
I don’t know. Neither option is appealing to me.
Recently I’ve been getting these off-the-wall ideas that DEMAND to be dealt with RIGHT NOW! So I comply. I’ve written a humorous grownup bedtime story, and most recently a Twitter limerick, the idea for which came to me while on Twitter (doh). You can find it on my blog at MySpace/debgallardo. I have no idea what will happen to it, how I might use it in the future. That’s not important at the moment. I just have to be faithful to the source of these ideas. Maybe it’s inside me, maybe it’s external. I’ve no clue. All I know is, when the inspiration is there, I’d better have pen and paper or a computer handy if I don’t want to lose it.
What creative ideas have suddenly come to you and what did you do about them? Talk to me! Comment below.
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