Block

A writer’s block is a condition writers experience when they can’t proceed their writing or cannot start the writing process at all from a lack of inspiration or ideas.

Is it ironic that I experience the writer’s block more for my personal journal than for academic writing?

Throughout the day, I have a plethora of discombobulated but relevant, discursive thoughts going through my mind. When I sit down at the end of the day to recount all these thoughts all—or at least some—and eloquently organize them with words, I’m buffered by a writer’s block that demands correctness and sensibility.

For this journal, I’m working on liberating my writing by practicing a style similar to a stream of consciousness. But my writer’s voice and tone is more formal and rigid from habit (or personal preference and style) than conversational and casual, so although this is a journal, it often doesn’t portray a sentimental and blithe approach a diary commonly demonstrates.

When I read my diaries from grade school scribbled in my juvenile penmanship and unaesthetic “artwork,” I cringe but simultaneously take pride in such records because at least I tried.

Many of these older diary entries are childish reveries that are more amusing and entertaining than creative, and some of them are painfully boring and literally journalistic in style—I’m pretty sure you can find nut grafs in some of them.

I like reveries, and even though fluff in some rhetoric is unnecessary, I like them sometimes. Especially for creative writing and reading for pleasure.

However, I also like direct, less-is-more, journalistic writing—like Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Miller, and Albert Camus.

I can’t fathom establishing my own preferred voice of distinguished style like the canonized authors have accomplished, but perhaps I won’t even realize when I’ve found it.