I have again been unable to write for a long time. The task that I had set before myself, of writing an autobiography from birth up to the present to explicate the causes of my depression, was just too big. After writing several large chunks and attempting to arrange the pieces in some sensible order, I finally had to put everything aside — temporarily — out of frustration.
I have returned to the project with the aim of proceeding in smaller steps, by dividing up my writing into themes. The first theme that I will tackle is the problem of my writer’s block, which I have already mentioned. It might seem strange and self-contradictory that I should be writing about having a writer’s block — but the fact is that I have been unable to write anything else. I am therefore going to confront this writer’s block directly by forcing myself to write whatever I have to about it.
I used to be a very prolific writer, which is quite different from how I find myself today. From elementary school to until just after starting graduate school, I wrote prodigiously. I had developed the habit of writing regularly early on, due to having received a lot of encouragement from my teachers and my peers. My parents put an end to this habit by punishing me very harshly throughout my life for my writings, and I finally stopped when the pain became too severe for me to withstand.
Much of what I wrote while in elementary school and high school involved predictions about the future, or rather what is now the present. I wrote about topics that I thought would become important, but which only a few people were paying attention to at the time. And these topics did, in fact, become important; or at least a lot more people are paying attention to them now than when I first wrote about them. Because of this popularity, much of what I had written then has become redundant — other people have since written voluminously on the same topics. But at the same time, they did not write about these topics from my perspective or with my motivations, and so I think I still have a lot to contribute.
The next series of posts will describe how I became such a prolific writer at a young age, what I wrote, and how my parents did everything in their power to put an end to my career as a writer and as a scientist, because they disapproved of my writings.
– davinci
0 Responses to “Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview”