Send in the clones

Now that spring is upon us, and the trees are beginning to leaf out and grow, my life has become a lot more hectic. Such is the row a forester has to hoe, but I’m busy planting trees, measuring trees, I’ve got three logging operations running at the moment, so on and so forth. I’ve been reading my usual three or four books a week. I’ve been keeping up-to-date on political movements, health care reform, cap-n-tax, the TEA Parties, you know, all the headlines that fill our days.

However, I find that I want to write about something and I can’t think up a topic. 

Of course, I can easily pop in and make comments on conversations and articles here and on the other websites where I post, but I can’t seem to come up with any ideas for a longer, more refined piece such as what WFTC tries to provide for our readers.  I don’t want to discuss the current debacle in DC right now, it’s too depressing and I think that just about every position a person can have on health care reform has already been hashed and rehashed over and over again.  I don’t want to discuss work, nature, child rearing, or any of the other activities and ideas that consume my days.

But I still feel the urge to write.

I just have a sense of unease, of urgency, of the need to put something intelligent down in word form (if I have ever accomplished such a thing even when I’ve been in touch with my muse). I just can’t find anything worthy of the site.

It’s been bugging me for a week or two now. I spent a couple of hours here Saturday evening after the kid went to sleep, thinking, staring at the word editor, occasionally writing some half formed, embryonic, not-quite-a-clone kind of paragraph about the usual BS that just made me grind my teeth and delete it after the first read. If there is one thing I do NOT want to be as a writer, it’s one of those writers that give us the same thing, over and over and over, never deviating from popular/populist thought. While I may hit the same topics on occasion, I don’t want to be the Sean Hannity of the writing world.

It’s really upsetting me. I’ve never had this problem before. I got used to cranking out 5-10 pages papers every night while I was in grad school and it’s almost reflexive at times. Not being able to fill a page with anything of consequence (well, of consequence to me) is annoying. It’s like feeling a tick crawling up the inside of your leg, or getting that one damn gnat out of the whole godforsaken swarm which decides that, with all of Creation in which he could roam, he MUST be right inside your ear.

I feel like Charlie Brown kicking the football with Lucy. I have a million ideas running through my head, from the year’s first encounter with a rattlesnake to a discussion I had with an old Marxist I know about whether or not human nature exists, but as soon as I articulate the idea, it’s like Lucy snatches the football away and I go sprawling on my back with a giant ARRRGGGHHHH!, to lay spread eagle in the dirt of my own maladroitness.

Do any of you ever feel the same? There are so many other writers here that have been writing for years, have been trained, or teach, in the literary arts, I can’t imagine that no one here has had the same feeling, and the accompanying irritation at your inability to scratch that particular itch. What do the pros have to say about the topic? What are the causes of “writer’s block”, if that’s what I’m dealing with? How does one go about getting past that?

Some of you do this stuff for money. There have got to be methods, exercises, something more productive than me just staring at the screen for hours. I’d imagine that deadlines would be impossible to meet consistently if there weren’t.