Writer’s Block

I’ve been writing professionally for more than 12 years now. I have written everything from the mundane office memos and daily to-do lists of officemates too lazy to remember what they need to do, to the high brow documentaries that won me considerable acclaim and even awards while i was in the media industry. I have written my hands raw until my knuckles were sore, from both using a pen and from encoding on the keyboard of a desktop computer, and what have i to show for it? Frankly, i don’t know.

I would like to think that all the years I spent writing amounted to something, at least something other than just putting food on the table and clothes on my back. This is partly because of that inexplicable human drive to seek meaning to your life, in all that you have done, in hopes of somehow plotting a way to a possible future, despite the futility of the entire exercise. I mentioned the futility of it because that’s the way life has been so far, at least with me. The best way I could describe my life is one failed plan after another, it’s like a great conspiracy life has, to ruin every single plan I ever had, no matter how well contrived, no matter how grand or mundane, it always happens. Whenever I have a plan, here comes the great juggernaut of life to come crashing right through all my plans, laying waste to my best efforts, reducing all my preparations into so much material and emotional rubble.

This fact has inevitably forced to have a paradigm shift of sorts. I no longer plan, not even for my work week. I just live my life one day at a time. Yes, that sounds so careless and irresponsible, buts it’s all I could to do to cope with the colossal bully that is life. A benefit I have come to appreciate with living one day at a time is that it gives me a certain perspective of how the micro often also affects the macro. Like the ripples a small pebble makes when it plunges into a huge body of water, what I plan and do for the day also, surprisingly, affects the long term aspects of my life. I mention this paradox because I have discovered that it is inextricably linked to my writing.

I was finishing my usual quota of scripts for the show I was writing for, at the time it was a two minute docu-feature on cancer and on how a small group of alternative medicine advocates managed to prolong their lives through a combination of alternative therapy, herbs, and new age methods. After I had finished it, it aired, and I gave it no more thought as I plotted my next topics for the show, when a lady called me up some three months after it had aired. Turns out she sought me out over the multitude of writers in the station, most of whom have the gall to call themselves writers when they can’t even get their subject-verb agreement down pat. The lady had been calling for a couple of days and she was asking for the writer of the docu-feature I made, and she had a bit of trouble because there were some other writers whom she had been forwarded to and who had, incidentally, also written a feature on cancer sometime in their career. She managed to sort them out somehow and she finally tracked me down. I asked how she managed to and she said she mentioned that the feature had a distinctive closing that she asked the other supposed writers to elaborate on, when they couldn’t, she realized the person she was talking to wasn’t the real writer of the feature. She said she just had to thank me for writing the feature, and while the therapy didn’t really stop her cancer altogether, it gave her enough time to be with her son, who could not come home before the date that her doctors expected her to pass away. She said the therapy I wrote about gave her just enough time to spend a few weeks more with her son, and that meant all the world to her.

Having said that, while i still do wonder if my writing has ever done any good for anybody else other than me, life does sometimes have a funny way of telling you that sometime in your life, you did good.