Friday, August 26, 2011

My 1st Writer's Block



I have been thinking of a topic for my today’s blog since morning. It’s almost evening and I still can’t get a proper opening line. I can now feel the pain of the people who do this for a living. It is a bit like the blue elephant paradox. If someone asks you think about anything but a blue elephant – a mysterious blue elephant appears in your mind’s eye. The image gets clearer by the second as you try to fight the thought. Yeah, what I feel is a bit like that – as much as a try I can’t get myself to think about anything worth writing.

Then I walked to my bookshelf in search of some inspiration. Somewhere between Bible and Bhagwat Gita, I stumbled up on this amazing tome. Flipping through its pages I told myself –‘This is it!  If this can’t inspire me, nothing can! ’.  I instantly fell in love with the way the book is laid out. Each of the words is carefully selected and given individual attention to form a wonderful medley of text. Despite the seemingly rigid order of events, remarkable thing about this writing is that  is it doesn’t matter where you start or finish – it makes sense every time.  It is one of the most influential books in the history of English literature. I feel extremely lucky to have come across it at this difficult stage of dealing with my inaugural writers block.

When you actually think about it, every book ever written, every speech ever delivered, every author ever lived on this face of earth should have borrowed from this. From Aardvark to Zyxt, Oxford English Dictionary has it all !! Just think about it, all of Shakespeare, the entire Obama rhetoric, today’s best-seller, next year’s booker prize – OED has it all. I just need to read them in the right order! 

Image courtesy: Corbis.com

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...