Fust Jucking Write the Thamn Ding!

I didn't want to write this post. I also didn't want to write any of the three other good blog topics I've come up with in the last week. And the two short stories I'm actually working on as well as three good ideas waiting in the wings. I also didn't want to do the editing I'm supposed to be finishing (okay, that's not even slightly unusual >.>). I don't want to enter the flash fiction competition I was going to enter today. By this point, I also don't want to read either of the books I'm reading, or play piano. I don't want to play videogames.

Something is up. For a few days my mood has been up and down like a yo-yo (yeah, go on, insert your own dirty simile there. I can't be bothered). The final danger-sign set in today when I caught myself dwelling on mistakes I made when I was twelve. Seriously. There was a history class, and I forgot all my notes for my project, and then when the teacher told me off, being the normally-perfect student I was, I handled it so badly and got so confused that I ended up talking back to her and earning myself the second detention I'd ever had.

From there it was a short step to contemplating ex-girlfriends...

Let's just say I'm on a downer. No idea why, except that I really, really, really hate winter and if I had my way would still be in hibernation right now. It's been coming on at least since Monday, probably for over a week. I've tried a bunch of pick-me-ups (most successful: reading random posts from my good friend AJ Aalto's blog. Most unplanned: listening to a group of film students planning their next project and hearing the following phrases: 'So, where are we going to get these hookers from?', 'You can be the brothel madam' and 'His skin was white but his penis was brown'. Sometimes my job has real perks...), but nothing seems to have stopped the downward slide.

I've never been diagnosed as depressive or bipolar, though possibly only because I've never sought a diagnosis (I'm reluctant to risk being put on antidepressants of any kind, but that's a blog post for another time), but I know a lot of people who have one or the other condition and supposedly so do a lot of writers. I'm not really talking about depression in general, though.

It's tempting, though probably facile, to suggest that many cases of writers' block work this way, a downward spiral of failing work ethic and depleted passion until every file you open becomes a mountain to climb. Fortunately, and unlike most other cases of depression, we writers are blessed with a simple and easy way out.

Fust jucking write the thamn ding.

(aren't spoonerisms fun?)

In some ways I'm writing this blog post purely for myself, purely for the sake of writing something. But maybe you're in the same position, or will be, or have been, and I find it easier to blog at you than at myself, so you get this full in the face whether you deserve it or not. The answer to writer's block, particularly when accompanied by any kind of downer, is to write something.

If you stop writing and let it get the better of you, you're not going to start feeling better. You're going to start feeling guilt and/or shame for not writing. Then you're going to start feeling like you don't deserve to be a writer. Then you're going to start feeling like you don't deserve to write. And then you're jucked.

So, Rik, and anyone else who happens to be listening, get writing. ;)