
Sometimes, for me, dissolving a block requires brute force. Screw letting my creativity flow and bubble spontaneously–been there, done that, and this poem still won’t yield even a rough draft. I haven’t written a new poem for months–got preoccupied with memoir tasks, then found when I returned to Poppytown that my efforts at creating drafts for the missing poems met with internal silence.
Yesterday, I vowed to make a rough draft of something. No matter how rough. Jagged, uneven, sharp-edged, whatever. I dragged this title into the arena and swore that only one of us was coming out alive. I took out the paper with the poem title on top. I set a timer for one hour. Go.
And it worked. There’s a draft now. I’ll worry about revision later–what matters is that there’s something to revise. Is it as good as the version of the poem that may or may not have ever come to me in a gentler way? I will never know. But I’m pretty sure it is better than a blank page.
I do a variation of that when I’m in such a phase. I tell myself to write the crappiest crap I can. That often reveals to me that the block I’ve been having is just mental, since I’m able to churn out the words once I let go of ‘perfection’. Thanks for sharing your own method!