I have always contended that I don’t have writer’s block. But some days, especially if I am not feeling well, I have writer’s lethargy. I can be slow to come up with the next thing. Writing can become bogged down and I am easily distracted or lose focus and have to return to what I was trying to do previously.
There is evidence that I have often had that kind of problem frequently on this blog. One thing I do to overcome writer’s lethargy is suddenly start thinking about how you can overcome writer’s block. What are the strategies that help me overcome it?
I often resort to “kickstart statements.” These are surprising or deep-left-field items that give the old brain a shot of adrenaline. The picture of the girl with the message blackboard is that kind of kickstarter. I never could have used that thing in any kind of social-media post when I was still employed as a teacher. It has the potential to generate parent complaints and administrative thoughts about evaluations and contract cancellations. But there really are kids who have thoughts like that in your classroom, and I know because not only was I a kid like that myself, I used it as an optional journal topic for writing practice, and, boy! do they ever catch fire when they can write about something like that and they know only the teacher is ever going to read it. It is the way I learned how many of my students had ever been to a nude beach in Corpus Christi or Lake Travis (Hippy Hollow.)
I can also look around the room, or scroll through my media library on WordPress and find an image or an item that generates ideas, responses, and even stories. I scrolled through to find this image of the Gummi Bear, who was a brief internet sensation on YouTube a few years ago coming from German CGI cartoons that illustrated earworm music with dancing green gummy bears. There’s a lot a goofy writer like me can run away with inspired by a nonsense thing like that.
It is also possible to generate new ideas by deconstructing a metaphor in as humorous and convoluted a way as possible. This word-food thing is the result of writer’s lethargy of a while back.
Of course, there is always the ranting factor. This, I think, is a go-to method used by stand-up comedians. They will pick something that is deeply bugging them, like the rats that inhabit my attic and walls during a winter that hasn’t yet completely gone. And they start listing all the ways they can make funny stories about the time the rat appeared on the bathroom floor tiles while my daughter was on the toilet, or the time the dog killed a rat that was in the trap already, but not dead enough not to bite back with the dog’s nose conveniently within the reach of rat teeth. And then they can rant onward about how disgusting rats are. And how can anyone look at a rat face and think they are cute? You look at that evil, beady-eyed face and you don’t think Mickey Mouse, you think plague, disease, the Black Death, and how much the Bank of America lawyer who sued you looks just like that.
So, you can see that generating ideas is easy. And you can write something interesting even on days when you can’t think of anything … quickly. When you have, not writer’s block, but writer’s lethargy.
Catch a Falling Star 
Do Not Crush the Butterfly…
Art on the bedroom wall, with Christmas lights being used as a night light.
Talking to a school administrator the other day about the challenges my children and I have been facing in the last year, I had one of those experiences where you get a look at your own life through someone else’s eyes. “Wow, you have really been on a difficult journey,” he said. I just nodded in response. Financial difficulties, health problems, dealing with depression… life has been tough. But you get through things like that by being centered. Meditation tricks. Things you can do to smooth out the wrinkles and keep moving forward.
I always return in the theater of my mind to a moment in childhood where I learned a critical lesson. My life has been one of learning how to build rather than destroy. It has been about creating, not criticizing.
Electric lights have come to Toonerville, helping to light the darkness.
When I was a boy, I was a serious butterfly hunter. It started when Uncle Don gave me a dead cecropia moth that he had found in the Rowan grain elevator. It was big and beautiful and perfectly preserved. Shortly thereafter, I located another cecropia in the garage behind the house, a building that had once been a wagon shed complete with horse stalls and a hay loft. I tried to catch it with my bare hands. And by the time I had hold of it, the powder on its wings was mostly gone. The wings were broken in a couple of places, and the poor bug was ruined in terms of starting a butterfly collection.
A cecropia moth
Undeterred by tragedy, I got books about butterfly collecting at the Rowan Public Library and began teaching myself how to bug hunt. I learned where to find them, and how to net them, and how to kill and mount them.
I discovered that my grandfather’s horse pasture had thistle patches which were natural feeding grounds for red admiral butterflies (pictured top left) and painted lady butterflies (top right). But if you wanted to catch the rarer mourning cloak butterfly (bottom picture), you had to stake out apple trees, particularly at apple blossom time, though I caught one on the ripening apples too.
The tiger swallowtail was the butterfly that completed my collection, and it was finished when one of my cousins caught one and gave it to me because she knew I collected them.
But then, one day, while I was sitting on a blanket under a maple tree in the back yard with my notebooks open, writing something that I no longer even recall what I wrote, the backyard tiger swallowtail visited me again. In fact, he landed on the back of my hand. I dropped the pencil I was writing with, and slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over underneath him so that he was sitting on my palm.
I could’ve easily closed my hand upon him and captured him. But I learned the lesson long before from the cecropia that catching a butterfly by hand would destroy its delicate beauty. I would knock all the yellow and black powder off his exquisite wings. I could not catch him. But I could close my hand and crush him. I would be victorious after a summer-long losing battle.
But that moment brought an end to my butterfly hunting. I let him flutter away with the August breeze. I did not crush the butterfly. It was then that I realized what beauty there was in the world, and how fragile that beauty could be. I could not keep it alive forever. But it lasted a little big longer because I chose to let it.
So, here is the lesson that keeps me whole. Even though I had the power, I did not crush the butterfly.
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Tagged as bug hunting, butterflies, wisdom