Writer's Block

I haven’t written in a week. My mind has stayed as blank as the page in front of me. I pick up my pen and begin to doodle in the corner, breaking in the page for when I might find actual words. Unlike actual birth (I think, I have to admit that I’m not an expert), creative birth cannot be forced in any way, it will just happen. You might just be waiting tables or cycling or tuning out of a conversation with friends when the contractions come in waves. If you’re too late to capture the idea, you will miss the birth and lose the child.

But here I am, racing on my scrap horse through Amsterdam, and in front of me, my writer’s block speeds off. I can barely make out the postcardability of the houses alongside the canals, as I peddle and pant. My only true goal is to overtake my writer’s block and beat the shit out of it. I will use its skin as a parchment to scribble a new inspiring tale on. Writer’s block ignores a red light but as I follow, cars are closing in from both sides.

But here I am, at one side of the table, with my writer’s block across from me. We might be playing poker, but I would have to google some technical terms and strategies to make the context and descriptions seem more natural, realistic. What if I do that research and an expert reads it and it turns out I was wrong about everything. Maybe if I want to describe my struggle with my writer’s block, I should choose something more up my alley?

              

               What I could write about?

1. Feminism Already wrote on several feminist topics, it’s how I profile myself. So something about a buff self-sufficient gay boy, or wait, maybe free the nipple is better. Maybe combine it with science fiction? Free your 8 nipples? Maybe a coming out story, is it memoire time? No, that is too personal to share, but then again does that not make it precisely something I should share? 
2.  . . . . . 
3.  . . . . .

3.   

I should do a literary analysis of smoking described throughout literature. Yes, instead of fiction, I’d show a more thoroughly  intellectual side of me. I’d describe what states of mind authors hide behind smoking behavior, such as anxiety, panic, carelessness or rebelliousness, and look at which words in the extensive smoking vocabulary have specific emotional connotations. When do people breathe clouds, puff away, fume, steam, fidget with their ciggie, roach, cancerstick, stub, jab, crush or toss it out? What does it say about a character if (s)he huffs a cigarette, a cigar or a joint? 

But what if analysis turns out to be boring to read? The reader might expect me to lead them to other planes of reality and existence, exposing ties and references made by other minds before me. Actually, since we live in a postmodern era, everything I analyze, write or think, has already been analyzed, written and thought before.

                              I can’t be original.

So let’s do what I did already: pick a cliché sequence of tropes and rewrite them, aware of that the writer’s profession at this point in time is reassembly rather than production. I’m a collage artist. Being an artist implies that one can turn pulp into art, but what if I turn fiction into pulp? My frame of reference is limited, everyone has their limits. As I’m just one person at a time,  how can I convey true meaning if I only follow the threads forming my own web of references, possibly unable to understand the meaning I create for others in my own writing? In other words, I can only see the world through my eyes unless someone entrusts me to see their perspective on my - or depending on how you view reality - our world. So how can I use other people’s thoughts while only perceiving a segment of their meaning, to convey my own truths to others?

Nothing comes to mind.

Maybe it’s time to seek inspiration from the quotes I collect that strike me as powerful or literarily playful; they might be a good start for at least exploring what my options for this collage are. People on social media appear to find their sense of purpose and inspiration through quotes, implying there must be some collectively understood knowledge that can be transferred in them.

My collection of quotes in my current notebook consists of:

a.      One has to remark that men ought to be well-treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves from lighter injuries, of more serious they cannot, therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.   (Machiavelli, The Prince, III)

b.      Frank had the body of a bull, an image he intensified by wearing great gold hoops through his nipples. Unfortunately he had joined the hoops with a chain of heavy gold links. The effect should have been deeply butch but in fact looked rather like the handle of a Chanel shopping bag.              (Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body)

c.      And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again. And Chaos announced it was about to give birth to a new me by putting these words in the mouth of Rabo Karabekian: “what kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?”              (Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 218)

Somehow it feels like these would not form a  collage that conveys one truth to the reader. What if people don’t even want to read my stories anymore? What if people do not even care for the art of the narrative anymore? The power of the narrative has recently been muddling the reader’s quest for truth. I can’t imagine how many people stopped reading fiction when we started living in a world where we already spend all day trying to distinguish truth from fable, equally presented to us as facts. 

When I see my lists, quotes and ideas codified in my own handwriting, I feel empty. I put my pen down. The cycle of temporary defeat and creative birth continues and I will have to wait, as a blank slate, to be inspired.

 I work, go to museums with my sophisticated friends, occasionally drink too much at a bar, sturdy Arabic. Enchanting photography, flat tires, afrofunk, late nights, buttshaking, cycling through the rain and forgetting to finish the food in the corner of the fridge on time. While I’m taking out the rancid trash, all synapses in my brain are firing, buzzing and zinging. It’s happening.

The World Outside of Reality

Reality is a fragile concept. Humans feel the need to demarcate it, to ensure that we are talking about the same perceptions of time and space. Our reality is shaped by culture and science, which dictates how we interact with our environment. Growing up, we learn that reality is a location, but as we develop, it becomes a mindset. As under-stimulated high-school students in a damp classroom, we’re taught that reality might not even exist. Apparently Plato had locked his students in a cave for a lifetime and once they got out, they only believed in the world of the shadows. Berkeley said that if an abandoned building collapses and no one witnesses it, it’s impossible to know whether it actually happened. Apparently it’s necessary to state that cameras or bunnies hopping by also counts as witnesses. But realistically speaking, my class appreciated Matrix metaphysics the most, taught by our favourite substitute teacher, Keanu Reeves. What if humans just made up rules to make sense of what we call reality, while we are actually dreaming, floating in rows of industrial bathtubs. Our entire reality could be completely coded, invented or calculated by something or someone. 
  

When reality was still a location to me, I learned how to write and attempted to capture it in illustrated diaries. My fantastical projects were always in separate notebooks, filled with fairy tales, short stories and entire worlds I would design. The constant production of writing was fuelled and inspired by the endless stories and books my parents would read to me. The concepts and locations of all the narratives seemed so realistic that they must have been real. For example, my grandma’s best stories were about her childhood in the Middle Ages, because she could talk for hours about all the knights and pages in search of the Holy Grail. The stories enhanced the world around me, giving the impression that mythical creatures existed in the corner of my eyes – when I would turn my head they quickly disappear and re-emerge in my blind spot. On the other hand, once I convinced myself of this mythical layer, I also brought monsters into reality, like dinosaurs that lurked behind my bedroom door, or the witch Bindoeventoken that would pinch my toes when I was sleeping. My parents solved that problem by letting me sleep with a wooden sword under my pillow, so I could fight off the monsters in my dreams. The wooden sword made me the knight in my narrative. 

When I was eight, me and my best friend wrote a religion into existence. Like many before us, we were in search for meaning and understanding of reality, but it seemed too simple for the answer to existence to be found in existence itself. Then were did all this mythical realness come from? We figured that there had to be a world parallel to ours, ruled by the dragon goddess Asa, in which all fantasy creatures lived peacefully and happily. At the edge of their world, the creatures of darkness brewed plans to destroy the entire mythical world, after which they would come to our reality to haunt and tantalize mankind. However, the enemies threatening our worlds materialized in the people around us. The frog monsters were based on some very strange people in our class, who called themselves the kregits. We prayed for the protection of our world, of which we had mapped every centimetre and composed an encyclopaedia of all its inhabiting creatures. We performed ancient rituals and spells to protect our fantasy, its symbolism and tradition actualized in writing. We believed that the future of mankind rested on our shoulders, two silly, blond girls who loved reading, writing and drawing. The narratives holding our religion together were so extensive and real to us that we managed to completely indoctrinate ourselves for four years, until my friend moved away. A functional cult is based on proximity of its members and the spell of the narrative we had summoned into reality wore off. 

I still wanted more from reality, which was now lodged back into its fixed locations, so I decided to become a writer. In middle school I wrote novels, abandoning story lines and first chapters constantly, because the ideas were all competing to be penned. I started writing with a friend again, as the rules of the fictional world you create together are unpredictable and challenging. We filled 13 notebooks and more than 900 pages with our fantasy universe, that was surrounded by an additional mythology we would jokingly make up as we cycled home together every day. Writing became a way of escaping monotony and exploring my new oversensitive adolescent brain. My own stories ranged thematically from the bizarre tales about geishas, assassins, female spies or anti-heroes that happen to stumble into a wild adventure and accidentally save the day. Maybe even about fish-people showing up at your door and taking you along their quest, or a guy who breaks his leg and realizes he always had felt like a one-legged person, his unconscious wish being fulfilled in a horrible accident, or a high-school drop-out who becomes a rock legend in Italy, fans screaming her name wherever she goes. 

One day I wrote a story about myself 20 years in the future, my fantasy guiding my pen over the paper. Once I finished and read it, the fluffy hairs in my neck straightened themselves and I felt overcome with unease. The narrative starts by introducing my introverted blond daughter who depended heavily on me due to a serious eye condition. I was divorced, apparently in hiding with my daughter somewhere. My husband had loved me, but I needed to get away with her. He reminded me of all our good moments, but I couldn’t hear it any longer. He became manipulative and eventually violent, so I took the child and left. I bought a small white-plastered farm in Andalusia, surrounded with blossoming orange trees. We were inside, the sun shining on her blond hair. The white lace curtains were blown through the window, tickling our faces. All of a sudden, she got up and seemed to look out of the window. I followed her empty eyes and saw my husband at the bottom of the hill, tall, suited up, wearing a silver gingko leaf on his collar. He must have been walking for days, his suit covered in dust and drenched with sweat. He saw me. 

The narrative stopped there, but every time I would fall asleep, I would dream about my daughter and I, lounging under the orange trees. She would run her fingers through the grass and ask me to describe its colour. Every night I desperately tried to explain the green, but would wake up before I succeeded. I started to worry about her even when I was awake, as if she was waiting in the corner of my eye, disappearing if I turned my head, making me unable to help or guide her. Dream, reality and narrative became increasingly intertwined. I didn’t want to sleep anymore, I didn’t want to dream anymore, but becoming an insomniac didn’t seem to solve anything, because now I had even more time to think about her. Now I had more time to write about it, which I now recognize to be the process of actualizing the narrative into my reality. Unconsciously I seemed to recognise that my reality and those of others were not compatible, so I kept it to myself. No one seemed to see that I was living two lives, and a month went by. 

My Dutch teacher gave a lecture on something insignificant, while I was thinking of ways to change my future (or present?). I realized that the story fundamentally changed my life like the religion did, as the characters in the narrative manifested themselves in my reality. I didn’t see or sense them but constructed them and their ability to influence my life.            In the middle of that insignificant Dutch class, I started crying. The realization functioned as a mental reset, in which all characters were transported back to their own realm. I was left embarrassed but relieved amongst my peers. I stopped writing fiction for a while, just keeping diaries to ensure that the narrative was based on reality, not vice versa. In the small philosophy classroom with its discoloured digiboard, I could debate reality without having to find answers, but drift away in my existential thoughts guided by great minds.

 Reality became even more abstract in university, now it’s only a simulation with no connection between symbols and meaning. We are being trained to deconstruct and reconstruct assumptions about reality, writing paper after paper about truth versus bias. We frame it as the entirety of history happening at once, a self-contained mathematical formula encompassing all matter or through the supposed reliability of empiricism. While we are researching our reality extensively, the campus environment seems to contradict all notions that define it. Time becomes relative and academics suck up all my energy and motivation, meaning that if I would leave the campus, I would not go far. My experienced reality was limited to campus and the route to the Albert Heijn, my favourite café and the station. I felt like the rest of the world was made of collapsing buildings, without me witnessing, recording or filming it. 
  
It did not take me too long to start studying literature, in which truth and fable are intertwined and the scholar has to carefully abstract his or her conclusions. Literature does not inform one of absolute truths, but the narrative describes an individual experience established through social relations. As human experiences make up the fabric of our culture and scientific discourse, the narrative is what collects and connects different disciplines. I became a self-proclaimed armchair traveller, like my high school mentor, travelling through different lives, dreams, traumas and tapping into a spectrum of human experience through the novels stacked on my desk. It made me realize that whereas we can never pinpoint a collective truth by trying to integrate our individual subjective experiences, literature represents many lived social realities, whose narratives underlie societal change. The mythical world right outside my perception has always been a metaphor for my experience, which I valued again once I realised its political potential. Whether Plato, Berkeley, Baudrillard or Keanu Reeves was right, does not impact my experience of reality itself, in the same sense that humans would act the same whether or not free will exists. Rather the narrative that I read and interpret has always had a profound effect on how I interacted with, thought or spoke about my world. The narrative became essential to understanding reality, but more importantly, I started using my own narrative as a tool to producing reality. I finally realised that whatever I write is shaping my social reality and on an unrealistically large scale, contributing to an essential body of text that could potentially change our society.

The Hash Tag

Characters

Leon Smith brother

Lucie Smith sister

Scene

LEON’s student house, the kitchen. Siblings are cooking dinner together.

Time

The present.

 

Act 1, scene 1.

Enter LEON and LUCIE, LUCIE is smoking a cigarette.

LUCIE

Thanks for feeding me dude, I completely ran out of food yesterday.

LEON

No problem, I’d be cooking anyway. Do you eat fish these days? (LUCIE nods) How are you doing?

LEON starts chopping vegetables.

LUCIE 

(inhales) Good, a bit anxious. Something happened yesterday, I feel a bit weird about it (pauses, then hesitantly) Alright, let’s see. So last week me and my friends went to this gay club, got schwasted. In the smoking room I talked to this guy, he seemed pretty cute and we exchanged numbers. Obviously, I forgot my papers and had to borrow them from someone. Oh by the way, can I help with something? 

LEON 

(jokingly) Nice one, picking up guys in a gaybar. Yeah, you can fry the fish if you want.

LUCIE stirs in a pan, picks up cigarette from ashtray

LUCIE 

(smokes) Then this guy called me yesterday, said he wanted to come through. Didn’t really have much to do and I wanted to get to know him, so an hour later he was on my couch. I was like, “what is it like to be James?”, turned out his name was Xavier. A pianist, 28, studying medicine, very smart. He showed me some of the songs he composed. Pretty impressive, but it felt very much like that was the goal.

                                   LEON

What kind of music does he write then?

LEON throws vegetables in pan.

                                   LUCIE

(surprised) It was a sort of modern trippy piece, like a sound collage. But that’s besides the point, he like played it for twenty minutes, while we just.. listened. (laughs)

                                   LEON

So what happened then?

                                   LUCIE

Well, he was quite the flirt, but I didn’t really remember what he looked like, so when I picked him up from the bus I was already a bit surprised but I mean, I wasn’t gonna say that. So he started making moves on me, while I was still trying to have an existential conversation with him. (scoffs)

                                   LEON

(suppresses smile) I guess that’s one way of dealing with it.

                                   LUCIE

Anyway I said “wow, calm down, I just wanted to hang out man.” So we talked again until he kissed me again. Didn’t really see a reason why it would be wrong to kiss back so I did. (increasingly agitated) But he started like touching me and I really did not want that. I told him I wasn’t feeling it, but he kept insisting and every time I’d take his hands from my pants or boobs, he’d just pretend like nothing happened. I told him to stop that. I told him I was uncomfortable. I asked him to leave. He just kept creeping up on me and refused to leave and ugh, it was awful y’know… I just feel sort of violated.

LUCIE smiles quietly and stirs intensely.

LEON

Fuck man, I’m sad to hear that happened, that sounds awful…  (pauses, carefully) But you know that you said yes when he wanted to come over to your room. I mean, was there even anyone else home? Why did you meet a random guy anyway? You should have been more careful.

LUCIE

I just thought he was a nice person to hang out with. Yeah, he came to my room but still, when someone says no, it’s no. (stamps cigarette out in ashtray) And the worst part is, I don’t even think that guy has a single clue what he has done to me.

                                   LEON

I mean he obviously crossed your boundaries, but don’t you think you led him on? I mean when he started kissing you, you could have guessed what he was trying to do.

LUCIE

(scoffs) So kissing men means promising sex? That’s such bullshit. I understand you see it as a grey area but it’s just… not okay. That’s why I’m so happy that the hashtag is going viral.

LEON

Come on. It has been used a lot, but do you think it actually helps? Yes I know which people it happened too, but putting your story out there just victimizes you. Is it really going to change something in how people behave? Maybe in Hollywood, but for people like you.. I don’t think so.

LUCIE

(intensily) Dude, it’s to raise awareness. People need to understand that this doesn’t happen to just some people around you. Everyone of my friends starts telling their stories, once someone starts talking about! (pauses) Fuck man.. Let’s talk about something else.

LEON 

(sighs, after 30sec) Well, food’s almost done. I’m starving, can you put some plates and cutlery on the table?

                                   LUCIE

(suddenly excited) On it!

Exit LEON and LUCIE