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Writer's Block

A woman in a dark room raises her hand toward her head as glowing fragments of paper and light hang frozen in the air beside her fingertips

I was played by my own thoughts again...when I'm miles away from a pen and paper they run fast and kept on jumping around my head but when my hands are ready, they just froze in that mid-air — between the tip of my fingers and my scalp.

They call it writer's block but for me it's the most powerful and frustrating part of being a writer. I just wish there is a machine that will instantly write whatever was on my mind whenever it's going berserk with ideas.

Those brilliant phrases that visit during showers, the perfect endings that appear while driving, the character revelations that emerge at 3 AM—all vanished when summoned intentionally.

Glowing moth-like ideas slip out of a fogged shower door and drift away down a dark hallway toward a clock

This cerebral tease is both my torment and my gift. The thoughts that dance beyond my grasp remind me I'm still a creator even in silence. They push me to chase them harder, to set better traps, to become quicker at capturing their essence before they evaporate.

A writer's desk set like a trap: a butterfly net and corked jars of captured light, one jar tipped open and its light escaping

Perhaps the frustration is the point—the tension between what we can conceive and what we can capture is where the magic happens.