When I Am Blocked

A six months absence from WP; a half year hiatus. I stopped posting because I felt repetitive. The phrases I typed had been written and typed again and again before. I didn’t see any improvement in myself even though I had expected to see gradual changes–hopefully for the better of course–in wording, thoughts, structuring of a piece, aspiration. I don’t know why I thought in this vein. Probably I believed in progress and the gradual movement towards a better future no matter what. Anyway, in reality all I saw was the plateau and the grinding halt as if I had come to a fixed boundary, beyond which I could only wish to go but I could never go.

However, being away from WP, I have felt a void. I don’t know how to describe it.  It is not an explicit void, but a quiet and silent void, which works imperceptibly underneath the everyday bustle. I don’t feel its existence conspicuously, but it is there. WP used to be the place for me to go while I was frustrated. When WP was not present, I had to find something else to vent, like watching very bad imitation K Drama, where dialogs are all cliches and stereotypes reign and I felt more idiotic than ever. Still familiarity exerted claims on me that I could not easily refuse.

Another reason that I was away for six months is the fact that I often felt I was blocked, with nothing to write for a WP post. In the past, whenever I was blocked, I would continue to torture myself, continue to follow the same kind of linear thinking, blame myself for incapacity. None of these worked. However, since then, I have learned several tricks to deal with a blocked mind:

1. The first one is to start ranting and don’t try to organize my thought. I learned this trick from a book. This will get the words flowing even if the style of flowing is less than desirable. I’ve tried it several times, and I did once stumble on one or two thoughts that I would not have come across without the ranting.
2. The second one is to dig deeper into my past. Make lists of my favorite books, my saddest moments, my most embarrassing moments, my regrettable episodes. At first I was only listing it out as a practice, following the advice from a book on writing craft, but soon I started to get a hang of it. Digging is very interesting and enjoyable and self revealing. For example, I discovered that my favorite book is not really novels, but rather biographies and semi-philosophical writing and history. I didn’t know that. Also I found that I was even more upset about my failed friendship with my female friends than with my male friends. Probably a big part of my psychology is still a mystery to me, which means I don’t even understand myself.  
3. Find a writing prompt somewhere
4. Find an object and write a story about it.
5. If all above fail, read. I am reading very slowly since I have not been able to develop an ability to speed read. If I just read a little quicker than I am currently doing, I will feel reading less enjoyable. I guess reading speed has more to do with the ability to enjoy reading fast rather than the ability to read fast.