Just Keep Swimming

Dory: Hey there, Mr. Grumpy Gills. When life gets you down do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do?

Dory: Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim.

Ah, were truer words ever spoken? I think Dory deserves a place amongst the great philosophers of the age, right up there with Socrates, Descartes, and George Carlin. “Just keep swimming!” just about sums it up, doesn’t it? And do you know what’s even better? Simply substitute almost any verb for “swimming” and you’ve got a template for life.

Take, for example, a little thing I like to call writer’s block. Ouch. Yeah, you know what I mean. Blank page. Blank head. Fingers not moving . . . except when they stray back to Solitaire. It’s a bad, bad thing, and it happens to everybody at one point or another. Writers great and small all succumb to its icy grip eventually. Most usually get past it, which is why we have seven Harry Potter books. Of course, once in a while, the writer gets stuck forever, which is why we don’t have eight Harry Potter books.

So what does one do? How does one get past this barrier of barriers? I finally learned the trick. At many, many points during my current draft, I’ve hit the wall. You know the wall. Your plot is stuck, you have absolutely no idea what to do next and you really, really can’t play more than two hundred and seventeen games of Solitaire in a row. So what’s left to do?

Just keep writing, just keep writing . . .

No kidding. It sounds silly, but it’s actually started to work for me. Instead of being blocked permanently, I just keep writing. I throw out all the rules, all the plot, all the . . . um, rules, and I write. It’s actually rather liberating. It’s just like the old saying, “There’s nothing like looking if you want to find something.”

It’s likely what gets written doesn’t make it into the final draft of anything. But it doesn’t matter. It might spark something else that does. The whole point is to just keep writing and sort it out later. Trying to sort it all out before the pen hits the paper is just a recipe for a stack of blank paper.

And now we’ve reached the point where I come up a witty ending to my blog post. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything at the moment. I’m sure it will come to me if I realize that now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their quick brown fox jumping over the lazy jackdaws who love my big sphinx of quartz.

Hmmm . . . on second though, how about this instead:

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