As a writer whose life is immersed in words, I have an inevitable fascination for artists who paint and draw their images instead, people like J.M.W. Turner or Georgia O'Keefe or Thomas Hart Benton or Monet. For them there was a need to create their works non-stop, as if they were trying to keep up with the flow of what they saw and felt before they were caught by the avalanche of ideas that came constantly. They had nothing like the angst writers' biographies so often describe, no blocks, no hesitation or self-doubt. With or without applause, their lives were too filled with the passion to get the image on paper or canvas to worry very often or very much about whether someone approved. Yes, they felt competitive, yes, they made choices that were sometimes flawed, and many succumbed to a life that seldom held a cautionary approach, be it with their lovers or their families or the way they lived.
Musicians are much the same. I recall Philip Glass answering an interviewer when asked if there was ever a time he didn't think about music. He said it was always with him, that often he felt he was holding down a cauldron of sound, letting a little of it out at a time, but worlds of it waited to be released. No, he said, there was never a moment when he didn't hear the music.
The point here, one to be explored in other posts to follow, is that it is the same for writers, despite the ongoing angst. We are never without the image and sound of the words that grab us. A phrase on a piece of scrap paper is as much evidence of this as a formal page typed in its final revision. I find notes everywhere...in old boxes of forgotten stories, in the pocket of a coat, in a drawer of receipts, in a handbag, or pushed between the pages of a book. I find the outline of a story on the back of bill envelopes from years ago. They serve as the apprentice notes for stories not yet written or ones that don't need to be, or that appear later as if out of the blue, having already been seeded, but they are as ubiquitous as the idea of breathing. I think writer's block is not a sign that inspiration is not there but rather a sign that so much of it is, we can become afraid of opening it up, like Glass' cauldron. For if we do, then we experience a passion that won't let go. We take a step that can't be retracted, and we can't assume an instant longer that we don't care. We do. The words are there.