Writer’s Block and Direction — to go forward, you must first have a road.

To go forward, you must first have a road. This may be a perfect plan as to exactly what one would like to say, but it may also be a general outline. It may be an emotion. It may be a thought that is just dying to burst out, and finds a way to do so through words. But mostly, it is a detailed mental sketch of what you would like to say. Writing is not linear, one does not lay the road and drive on it at the same time — one must first lay before one can drive. While you are laying and others are driving in separate roads beside you, it will appear as if they are zooming past. But no, they are just driving on the road that they already finished laying, and you can be like them if you finished your road and drove down it. A reader reading this right now may think “why talk about this? What about it?”. To figure that out, I must first explain a bit of a personal story.

It’s English Class, and time for one of the so-called “In-Class Writing Assignments”:

Everyone is writing away while I sit, tapping my pencil on the paper….. It gets so annoying hearing the sound of other people write that I must practice how to sit and think while hearing the sounds of pencils encircle me. It is an annoying place to be for sure, and just as I thought isolating the sounds of all the other pencil sounds would do justice to my writing, my time comes to an end. I had not written nearly as well as I would have hoped to. Not even close.

Curious as to what allowed those students to keep writing, I asked them.

Their almost unanimous response, at first, didn’t make much sense. It was ‘I just write” or “I just keep writing”. Yeah, isn’t that what we all do? Not really, as I found out. There was a missing component:

Direction

Back when I was in elementary school, I was given one of these pillars, and once I finished them, I was told that the hard part of writing was already behind me. The more I wrote under a time constraint, the more I found this to be true. Most of the time was not spent writing, but rather in thinking. Once I knew what I wanted to write, it wasn’t that hard to put my thoughts onto the paper. This seemed like the magic bullet to improving my writing, and I was right. If I got better at finding my direction and laying my road faster and better, then the writing will follow. Something instantly clarified in my mind: the people that I interviwed who had told me that they “just wrote” were describing the second part of the process, the one most pay attention to. If they had a solid direction before putting the pencil on the paper, then the writing experience would go exactly as they described. And that brought a clear answer to my original question. But that, in turn, begs a new question:

How do I find direction in my writing?

I am in firm belief that the only way I can go about achieving this is through setting time back to think and really hammer in to myself that the key is to find direction. When possible, I thought about what I was going to write in my assignment the following day, and if there was even the slightest doubt, I would not stop thinking. I knew that if I had a grainy idea, I would be unable to write. This, in turn, helped me tremendously, and I am extremely grateful for that. It may be hard, but I firmly believe there is beauty to be found in the fact that you must first lay the road before you can drive on it.