Its like my brain ate too much cheese

The thing that kills me is that I have good ideas. When I am alone in my car at three in the morning the ideas flow out of me in a torrent but by the time I get home the torrent is finished and all those fantastic ideas have flowed down river never to be seen or heard from again. The frustration from not being able to remember these ideas causes me to sink into a pit of self loathing and despair which of course triggers my inherent laziness and voila! Writer’s block.

Music seems to help me deal with this problem, specifically if I can remember what I was listening to when these fantastic ideas appeared in my brain. Sometimes a memory will trigger from the music and more often than not I write something that I feel is far inferior to that magical idea that I can’t remember. Of course that makes me wonder if the idea I had was great or if maybe my fuzzy memory of this ephemeral idea is perhaps making it seem like a better idea than it really is. That is when the paralyzing self doubt comes in and I give up and watch Buffy for the 75th time.

I haven’t really found a good solution to my writer’s block but I keep at it. I figure one day I will accidentally write something great much like I expect to win the lottery every day. It will totally happen. I swear.

Below is something that I wrote for a blog back before we were calling them blogs. We called them “opinion boards” and the op boards I started at focused on professional wrestling and then morphed into more pop cultureish websites. We had a discussion on our message boards about writer’s block that prompted me to write this.

Writing at opinion boards is a hobby for most of us. Actually, I’d go so far as to say that writing at opinion boards starts out as a hobby for all of us and at some point it stops being a fun diversion from life and becomes a chore. Something to dread. People quit, people come back but usually when they come back they aren’t the same, they lack whatever they had at the beginning. I have figured it out.

We aren’t writers. Plain and simple only about 5% of us are honest to God, writers. The rest of us are just relatively smart people with a word processor. The problem that we non writers have is that our ideas are limited. The “good” posts are finite and once we reach our limit, the ideas go away and we’re left with a void in our head and then writing for op boards becomes a chore. Usually that’s when new boards are formed or people “retire” from what is referred to, more often than not tough in cheek, as the “scene”.

The ideas run out which cause tempers to flare and friendships that began with the best of intentions flounder in our personal mediocrity and wither away until those relationships we held so dear are nothing more than a painful memory. An echo of something wonderful that now sounds hollow, almost frightening in that empty spot in our minds. We tend to dress it up a bit, make it out that we are the ones in the right or that we have suffered some grave injustice that makes our former friend a horrible monster, completely devoid of the qualities which made them a friend in the first place.

Pitiful.

Self Serving.

Reliving days of yore when we were the king and all the forum kids bowed down to worship our ramblings and funny pictures making us, for a moment in time (fifteen minutes if you will) immortal. Our words are destined to live on in the thoughts of some stranger hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away and that feeling of power is intoxicating. So much so that in our effort to keep that feeling alive we push out all our ideas in a relatively short period of time. Maybe a year, maybe a month but much too soon for the frail human ego to handle. And in a moment, a single instant that seems to last forever in a second, it’s gone. The well dries up, the fields of wheat wither and die in the heat of our despair and we are once again mortal.

How do we stop this? What steps can be taken to ensure that this fate does not befall us? You can hang about the forums, making sure no one forgets your name or the fact that you used to be “elite” and are certifiably “old skool!” Or perhaps you post once a month in a self indulgent rant about the good old days when men were men and posts really meant something. In the meantime dredging up the carcass of departed sites, stinking of decay with a hint of nostalgia. You could even complain loudly and often about how the current crop of writers don’t have the same spark, the heat, whatever it was that WE had “back in the day” at whatever site we used to write at before it went away or turned to porn to sustain itself.

None of those seem like fun or even entertaining ways to go about gaining the longevity we desire, even if they are all very common and happening right now. Don’t misunderstand, this is not an aimed attack at any one individual, I came to this conclusion after a two month writing drought that forced some much needed introspection.

I need to switch gears here for just a second and address the 5% of us who are writers. There are only a few of us who ever go beyond opinion boards. A select group who have true talent and who’s ideas don’t just dry up. I can think of two names off hand, two you may disagree with and most likely, with what you believe to be good reason. Brandon Stroud and Matthew Randazzo. Certainly there are people who will scoff at this, call me a fool or a kiss ass. What I mean when I say this is that these two have brought themselves up from the “scene” and moved beyond it. Randazzo keeps a website with his work as a portfolio for publishers. Brandon has been approached by actual media publications of the print kind and not of an electronic nature. These two have outgrown our little realm and while Brandon still has a bit of fun writing for one of these boards, it’s easy to see that his inspiration is far from “used up” after four years of internet writing.

If you aren’t one of these lucky few don’t despair, it’s not that big of a deal. Write for as long as you feel the inspiration and then stop. If the muse strikes you again post something, if not it’s all right. Just try not to be “that guy”. There’s nothing more sad than a pissy ex board writer trying to relive the glory days that never were.