Eat, Sleep, Writer’s Block, Repeat
By: Najwa Helyer
Tags: Writing, Life, Writers Block, Humour, Dreams

Eat, Sleep, Writer’s Block, Repeat

It’s 8 am, I wake up in the morning and make myself a cup of coffee before sitting in on my desk. Feeling refreshed in the morning after a night’s sleep and writing in my dream journal — noting down the weird dreams that I have in the night, it’s the best thing I ever started doing — I finally feel ready to open up my laptop and start writing.

But there it is…the hesitation…the self-doubt…the stupid ideas. Alright, let’s delete it all then.

It happens all day, I look out the window looking at the birds and giving myself a cute little pep talk about what a great writer I am despite my downfalls. I look at my dog who’s sleeping, wondering maybe I should write about her dreams instead of mine and think that’s an amazing idea.

Nope. Select all. Delete.

I’ve always said that creatives are cursed, we all have so much to say but sometimes there aren’t any words to help you get them out. So you sit there and wonder what’s the best way to move forward, but there isn't, you just ride the wave and hope that it’s all over soon. So I go onto other publications and read all sorts of pieces from all sorts of writer’s. Wow, this is great, this is inspiring, I can definitely do this!

No, I can’t.

When the day gets rough this, all I look forward to in the evening so I can go back to bed again and what happens? The Lords of Linguists pay me a visit and I can’t sleep. Ideas start rolling through my head and all I want to do is write. But when I go back to the same keyboard and stare blankly at the page at midnight knowing that the Lords only love me when I’m about to sleep.

This happens to me a lot and I know it happens to a lot of other people too. I try to thrive on it and let my ideas come to me in my dreams. I mean, Harry Potter came to Rowling in her dreams so maybe it could happen to me too. But here’s the other frustrating bit: I forget everything the moment I wake up. I remember a sentence, a rough idea or even just a word, but that’s all my brain can muster from my slumber. So what do I do?

Repeat.

Much to my annoyance, my day repeats and plays out exactly the same. Sometimes I believe that when I start writing about absolutely anything, it’ll slowly develop itself into a story and something beautiful will come out of it, but most of the time it doesn’t, it’s just a bunch of words that are put together. Reading them back is like trying to understand what my grandmother is trying to say to me — I know she’s saying something, I just don’t understand.

Let’s start again.

I light a candle this time, maybe even some Palo Santo. Maybe if I summon the Lords to visit me at the time where I actually need them, they’ll come. They don’t. It’s like they’re laughing at me. Whether they’re just taking me away from the one thing I love, my sleep or they think that my own self-destruction is a conduit for rebirth, I’m really not too sure.

But I figure that it’ll come to me soon…in a dream maybe and I’ll wake up in the early mornings to scribble it down in my dream journal. It may be undecipherable considering it’s been written by someone who’s woken up half-awake, but I’m sure it’ll be worth something one day.

The Lords will grant me something spectacular one day…maybe it’ll be the ability to read my scribbles to see what they mean, or an idea so amazing that I’ll execute it brilliantly.

Till then, I’ll just, select all, delete, repeat.