The Dreaded Blank Page
Oh, the humanity!
I've got a thiry-page paper due to my boss tomorrow. Things were going well. I hit fifteen pages with no real effort. This morning, I wrote three more literature reviews without even blinking (except for that short period where my contacts were so dry they almost fell out of my eyes on their own). But then ...
There are still plenty of topics to cover, plenty of studies to summarize, plenty of results to outline and discuss. But for some reason, everything I type comes out sounding like a four-year-old wrote it. "Bacterias are good. I like playing with them." No! No, no, no, no, NO!
I remember a point in my life when I never had writer's block, when a blank page was a story waiting to happen and not a threat. I remember when words flowed like a river (sometimes as disorganized as one) and I had to cut parts of papers to fit within the maximum number of pages.
Somewhere in there the ability disappeared. My suspicion is that the Tech mindset took over and I was suddenly writing like crap.
I wanted to be an English major. No joke -- I flipped a coin and ended up here instead. Just a bounce and roll away from not being at Tech ... Wow, that's something I can't even contemplate right now. The difference that one coin could have made doesn't even fit in my puny little head. It's too vast, too varied ... Ah, but I digress.
Maybe it has nothing to do with lost creativity. Maybe it has more to do with an impending deadline and the fact that I've been reading and writing for three and a half days straight, with short breaks to check email and goof off on the Internet (and, today, blog). Maybe it's just that my brain is in overload and needs a break.
I want a Pepsi.
Men are like fish. They both get in trouble when they open their mouths.
I've got a thiry-page paper due to my boss tomorrow. Things were going well. I hit fifteen pages with no real effort. This morning, I wrote three more literature reviews without even blinking (except for that short period where my contacts were so dry they almost fell out of my eyes on their own). But then ...
There are still plenty of topics to cover, plenty of studies to summarize, plenty of results to outline and discuss. But for some reason, everything I type comes out sounding like a four-year-old wrote it. "Bacterias are good. I like playing with them." No! No, no, no, no, NO!
I remember a point in my life when I never had writer's block, when a blank page was a story waiting to happen and not a threat. I remember when words flowed like a river (sometimes as disorganized as one) and I had to cut parts of papers to fit within the maximum number of pages.
Somewhere in there the ability disappeared. My suspicion is that the Tech mindset took over and I was suddenly writing like crap.
I wanted to be an English major. No joke -- I flipped a coin and ended up here instead. Just a bounce and roll away from not being at Tech ... Wow, that's something I can't even contemplate right now. The difference that one coin could have made doesn't even fit in my puny little head. It's too vast, too varied ... Ah, but I digress.
Maybe it has nothing to do with lost creativity. Maybe it has more to do with an impending deadline and the fact that I've been reading and writing for three and a half days straight, with short breaks to check email and goof off on the Internet (and, today, blog). Maybe it's just that my brain is in overload and needs a break.
I want a Pepsi.
Men are like fish. They both get in trouble when they open their mouths.
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