Topic > Personal Fiction: Myself as a Writer

What happened was that I had writer's block. The great success of my story “On Love and Forgiveness” had inspired my publisher to offer me more books, more deadlines, the same time bombs I had first escaped in law school. I would wake up to think about the words, to want to walk through pages of meaning, the connections in assonance, alliteration, or just the simple sense that moves the eye to thus jump to the play of sounds and resonances next door. My words were now tied to the monetary cost, to the drip of coins jingling in my childhood piggy bank, to the writer's voice ringing in my face. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay However, by willingly confronting the darkest recesses of my being, I feared losing a precarious grip on the erosion of sanity. Writing myself in an experimental state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion, I feared I would experience the withering of personal stamina to face another day of introspective scrutiny. I knew all too well from my experiences with my father that one step too far into the dark underworld of deconstructive self-examination and a person might not survive. The library would cheer me up, most days. I could already smell the musky smell of the books and in my mind I was flipping through pages with as many different textures as a forest; flimsy, fragile pages that had to be forced to turn; soft, fragrant pages, which presented their words as if they were a gift in the palm of a hand, and pages that opened heavily on their own, as if they were weighed down by the importance of their message. But now my deadline was in two days, and I couldn't sit in a catacomb of words, ignoring the almost audible rustle of desire: the desire that every book must be picked up and read, to live, to be born in someone's mind. .Instead, I confined myself to my apartment, sat at my table, and asked my mind to ignore the acidity in the pit of my stomach. Dust was sleeping on my bookcase and all my plants were drying next to my table. Coffee ringing on my nightstand, anxiety pills under my pillowcase, working around the clock to meet the whooshing sound of passing deadlines. There was no time for breakfast these days. Friends hadn't seen me in a while, my phone was always out of reach, and I was slowly forgetting to smile. While others became smarter under stress, I became heavy, as if I were a chained animal. I remembered that it was only after two years of working in the monotonous corporate world that I realized I was a writer. I had no particular expectations that the story would ever be published, because it was a bit of a mess. It wasn't until I found myself writing things that I realized I knew I said, "I'm a writer now." The story had become an incentive for deeper reflection. That's really what writing was at that time: an intense form of thinking. Yet now, faced with a blank slate - a page, a canvas, a block of stone or wood, a silent musical instrument - my mind was blank. Blank like a new sheet of paper, white like a starless sky. I tried to imagine a future reader for my production in order to take inspiration from him. My themes were completely foreign to him, indeed the entire environment I had conjured up before his eyes could only seem abstruse and extravagant, as if I were trying to transport him into a world that, although familiar from times gone by, now seemed put to the test. trial. margins, so that.