When I get writer’s block, it’s usually not so much as a lack of ideas, the cliche of the blank page staring me down (thought that does happen). I tend to get stalled when I know exactly where a story is going but my writing is failing to evoke the feeling I want.
I want to be able to do with my writing what I can do in my own mind. The other night, a bit bored of the sunny spring weather, I closed my eyes and thought about what it is like to be inside during a winter rain storm. The feeling of that, the damp quality of the air, the gray tint of the dim light, the sound of the rain on the pavement, feeling safe and secure, rather than cooped up and restless, as I feel when I’m indoors during spring, came to me so vividly that I got giddy and had to open my eyes.
And then I closed my eyes and imagined it again. The giddiness rose again. I repeated this until I could keep my eyes closed and examine the feeling and the scene, finding all the sensations and the details that led to those sensations.
Right now, I need to make the restlessness work for me. It’s the only way that I can evoke the feelings of two teenage sisters forging their own way past their increasingly indifferent parents or a young woman in 1930s San Francisco whose future is entirely reliant on whether her mother’s whim is to keep refusing her suitors or to finally marry her off.
