The best writers write from experience, yes? The most authentic artists are those most tormented, I hear. So it always seemed to me that my best work would come at my worst hour. I almost looked forward to it. To my dismay, however, as time passed I soon realized that the more intensely I felt about something, the more difficult it became to describe. Instead of expressing these crucial emotions and capturing the painful intensity in my work, I sank into lethargy, followed gracefully by apathy. Followed by disappointment, followed by frustration, followed by serious insecurity- if I can't capture this. what can I hold onto? The answer came for me in a radical change of style.

My solution came slowly, and it is still a work in progress. I began by buying a sketchpad. Every few days, before I went to sleep, I opened it up and dated the page. On each page, I simply wrote words and phrases that had crossed my mind during the day. Instead of trying to turn my experiences into a prize-winning novel, I simply recorded them the way they were recorded in my thoughts- in blips, phrases, partial images. I had more to say than I realized. Sometimes a flash of inspiration can be small- just a few words. Think of it this way- this phrase or thought you're writing down might be a simple idea now, but you never know where it might be useful later. It's like keeping an arsenal of ideas at the ready- so that when you sit down to write a larger work, you can flip through your collection. It could easily be true that while an idea you had a few months ago didn't serve any higher purpose, in hindsight it could become very significant.

From this, I moved to poetry. This was a difficult fence for me to jump, because my love for poetry is very intermittent to say the least, and I have always thought of myself as a prose writer. I tend to stay away from too much rhyme and pattern, just out of personal taste. However, I found that sometimes a story that was very intense and personal was easier to tell in short lines and phrases. Suddenly it seemed that the story was telling itself, as though it had always been there- I was just unsure of how to let it out. If you are struggling with writer's block, or struggling to express something deeply personal to you- I highly recommend a change in style or technique. It may simply be that you are trying to force prose into poetry, or poetry into a novel. Apples and oranges. Sometimes a story has a life of its own, and it's important to be be aware of this.

With this said, sometimes you have to accept that not everything can be captured. Life is filled with stories, and some will only live in your heart of hearts, and cannot be expressed. In cases like this, do as the Beatles do, and let it be.

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Here's a book that might get you started: The Writer's Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination