What's Writer's Block?

The piece of advice that I most took away from reading Anne Lamont's "Bird by Bird" was about writer's block. Whenever I used to face troubles with what I should write next or how I could even begin to write something, I would usually take a step back and reevaluate what I was trying to say. I would see if I could change my thesis or maybe even the entire topic of what I wanted to write about simply wasn't going to work out. Many a times I did that, but Anne Lamont showed me a different way to cope with writer's block.

What Anne Lamont recommends is something that I really never thought of before. What she says to do is to keep writing, even if it is totally off topic. She says to start in the very beginning like your first day of high school or the first time you played a baseball game. Begin to write anything that comes to mind and eventually, the thing that you wanted to write about from the very beginning will slowly but surely come into view. The way that I really connected with this was when i actually tired. I usually don't get writer's block, but when I was about to begin to write something for my Theater class, I drew a complete blank. We had to talk about a certain theme in a play we had recently read and gone over in class and I literally had nothing to say. I knew the topic and the story as a whole; however, I couldn't put a thing down on paper. So, really kind of out of no where, I thought about what I had read in "Bird by Bird," and what Anne Lamont discussed. All I kept thinking about was "start from the beginning and get going." I started writing about my first high school basketball, which really has nothing to do without the assigned topic. I wrote about a paragraph and suddenly it came to me. I skipped a line and went right through and the words seemed to flow write onto my lap top screen like I had written them a thousand times before. It was so easy, and all I could think about was this Anne Lamont girl was actually right.

Besides the fact that it actually worked, I learned a lot of things from this book. This book isn't really simply about writing and techniques, its about how she applied writing to her everyday life. I feel that I can do the same. Many things you can do in writing are things that people should try in real life. Something like starting over isn't the path that should be taken. What we should try to learn how to do is take a step back, relax and start from the beginning.