Rerouting

On processing and working around writers block through poetry

I've been having "writers block" on fiction for entirely too long.

Journaling prompts were also falling flat for me - I've mentally processed as much of my trauma and stuckness as I can, and I needed different ways to process and express the stuff that can't be put into grammatically perfect sentences and coherent plot lines...

So I turned back to an early love, and one that in recent years I'd only been using liturgically - to write prayers to made up deities and spells to whisper to the void.

You can see the hints of my poetic roots in my prose - it comes out automatically now - but writing poetry is different than writing poetic prose, and so going back to a different form is stretching me in ways I didn't know I need to stretch.

Rerouting

I was supposed to be writing a story...
about a witch who learned how to reweave reality
dialogue tight, pacing crisp,
the whole world turning on a paragraph...
literally...
but the characters fell silent
like saints gone on strike.

I waited.
Tried weed.
Tried threatening them with plot outlines.
Tried cooing soft metaphors
into their half-built mouths.
Nothing.

So I took a left turn.
Slipped out the side door of the narrative
and found a path paved in stanzas.
Here, the rules loosened.
The syntax breathed.
No one cared if the ending made sense.
It just had to sing.

I stitched verses out of stuckness,
out of the ache of half-sentences,
out of all the “once upon a times”
that refused to dress for work.

Turns out, the dam wasn’t dry...
just built for a different river.
Prose demanded obedience;
poetry whispered rebellion.
I listened.

Now I spill strange prayers
across the page like incense...
no plot, just pulse.
No climax, just current.
No moral, just motion.

And wouldn’t you know...
the stories are peeking out again.
Jealous.
Curious.
Maybe ready.

But I’m not chasing them.
Let them come find me this time,
wading ankle-deep
in this holy flood of verse.

by Gwynne