Writer’s block

I am sitting here struggling with how best to describe the relationship between China and the United States. I need one single sentence that would be perfect to kick off a paper and not one is coming. I am just sitting here typing hoping that something will occur to me. That is the thing about blocks, whether writer’s or painter’s or quilter’s, is that you can still do the act (of writing, painting, or quilting) but you are lost on the path to complete it.

Maybe path is the wrong word, because you are just lost. You don’t have a beginning or a middle or an ending. Just some vague notion regarding what you would want but no way of expressing what it is you want to express. Take me for instance. I know that China and the US have a complex relationship. My paper cannot start with the contention that the two countries have a complex relationship because it would ruin the purpose of the paper, which is to describe a segment of the relationship. So why not focus on that segment of the relationship which can be explained. My problem here is that it is difficult to isolate, like removing white from rice. I could simply say that they share an important relationship but that goes without saying. I could state the thesis in the opening sentence but it makes for a long sentence and unless the reader is thoroughly aware f my subject then the opening sentence would more likely cause them to put the paper down. Yes, yes, I know that if I have a topic that is too complex for a single sentence than my paper is not honed enough. Trust me when I tell you that the paper is well crafted it just needs a good intro because the right sentence will begin me writing the rest of the intro and then I can submit for publication.

But I am blocked.

So instead of writing the paper I am writing about being blocked because I hope that it clears something up and I get one of those “ahha” moments and can then begin writing about the Sino-American relations. This isn’t really working though.

In the past when I used to write creatively I would simply write many stories at once and then when I got stuck on one story I would move to the other but growing older has meant setting priorities and I no longer feel like I am in a position to write many stories. I wonder if I chose the wrong career.

I could write about my earlier life since it has nothing to do with the US having an inferiority complex to a country who has roughly 4 times the population of the US but only 1/5 to 1/6 the size of GDP of the US. Yet somehow the Chinese feel like a menace to the US. You wouldn’t have guessed me the type of person to share a fact like that had you known me when I was younger. I was a high school dropout who got his GED. The first two grades from the Community College I started up at were 2 F’s. Now I have a law degree from one the nation’s top universities and worked for the last 6 years at the world’s largest financial institution. I have counseled men in the highest positions and yet I am sitting here still unable to begin a silly paper.

Years ago I would have reveled in the fact that I was sitting here blocked, I would have interpreted it as my mind’s way of telling me I was unready to do a thing and I would move on to something else. I used to host a radio show and put together public concerts and print t-shirts to sell there and work at a publishing company and work at a pizza place and all sorts of things just to keep me busy. It never felt like I was doing enough, I always felt like I was just wasting away. I finally got the point where I was working a Kelly Temp job at a manufacturing plant. I was popping batteries out of these little shrink-wrap plastic containers and putting them in those little timers that fit onto treadmills and aerobic bikes. I could feel my brain shriveling.

So I decided to take school seriously in order to make sure that I did not have an entire life of feeling my brain shrivel. Now I am sitting here, fairly well off, and all I can do is hope that my brain comes together correctly to give me a good introductory sentence.

Maybe that is the thing about a block, it just feels like your brain is not working right. It is not that it isn’t giving you ideas but rather that the ideas it is giving you are not measuring up to the metric you are remembering the rest of work by. To write from the place of the block is like writing in a stranger’s voice, it just won’t fit in to the rest of what you have written there. So you wait until your brain reorganizes back to the way you want it.

I have heard of people who just push through blocks and write poorly and then try to edit it into shape later when the block is gone. I think people who do that are people who edit heavily later on. There are those of us who try to edit as we go and it frustrates us when we write something that we know we will just delete later. Putting crap on the page just makes editing that much more difficult later on because we are used to editing in chunks while we write.

I guess I could say something about symbiosis between the two countries; the flow of cheap goods from China in return for our cash which is then used to buy our debt so that we can invest more dollars into more cheap crap that forces them to buy more debt to strengthen our dollar to make sure their largest consumer market does not disappear. But that sidetracks the point of the paper I am writing. It is an important effect, to be sure, and one that the Fed and Treasury (not to mention the People’s Republic) should pay closer attention to but it is not fitting in the paper that I am writing.

I do have a completely different paper that needs re-writing to, it is a paper on the entertainment industry. That is almost as far gone from the China topic that I can get. Although the China paper looks at energy markets and the other paper looks at art markets, they both seem to be a type of commodity market. If anything the oil market is the better market because it has a clear finiteness. People can keep consuming art forever without ever running out, that means there is a possibility that the marginal dollar can get stretched to zero between the various parties offering art.

Now I just feel bored with typing