Mehak

 WRITER’S BLOCK 

I stared at the blank piece of paper. What was I supposed to write? I had no ideas. I only had that white paper. It was as if my mind went completely blank. How am I supposed to write 1,000 words if I can’t even make up a sentence? Why was writing so hard I thought as I looked around the room and saw all the others typing frantically. I thought to myself, how could they have already started? What could their idea be? How can someone possibly think of something so quickly? I just sat there confused, a little worried, and very annoyed. Why is it so hard to write a story? Am I ever going to finish? Why is everyone so good at this? Am I going to get a bad grade if I don’t write anything? I tried coming up with ideas that I could write about. After a long search, the idea I landed upon was about a girl that gets kidnapped. But that was still boring. Then I changed it up a bit. What if her friend was in on it the whole time? That’s still not amazing, but I really have to start, so I just went with it. I tried writing the introduction but came up with nothing.  

 

I decided to go get help from Mrs. Melbye. She asked me a bunch of questions about the characters and the setting of the story. To be honest I hadn’t even thought about any of that. When I came back to my desk, I read what she had written. It was so good and descriptive. I wish it was that easy for me to write. But now I had another problem. How was I supposed to write the rest of the story? After thinking very long and hard about it (for about 20 minutes) I came to a conclusion. I’m just not a creative person, that is why I can’t come up with anything. But that’s not a good enough excuse to not write the story. Suddenly I snapped back and heard someone shouting, “I have 600 words”. Then I heard another person say, “Guys I’m already done. I have 5,000 words. Mrs. Melbye are we allowed to have more words than that.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. First of all, how did you manage to write 5,000 words? And second of all, WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO WRITE MORE? My brain couldn’t comprehend that someone wanted to purposely go over the word count. I hardly even  managed to reach it. Then I heard Mrs. Melbye say the class is over. I thought to myself, I still have like two more weeks to work on this so it’s fine, it’s not that big of a deal and I’ll manage to finish it. 

 

The week went by so quickly, and I had absolutely nothing. Except for the paragraph, Mrs. Melbye wrote for me. As I walked into class the next Tuesday, I was kind of worried about what I would do. But I still had until Friday. But that wasn’t enough, and I knew it. I just kind of gave up on writing the story. I wasn’t able to write anything and felt there was no other option, so I just gave up. But really there was a quite obvious option. I could just do a different idea. But then the problem was what should I do? There are  just so many ideas that I just get overwhelmed even thinking about them.  

 

I got help from Mrs. Melbye again and she said I had “writer’s block” which was basically being unable to think of what to write or how to continue with writing. Which was exactly what was happening to me. But the question was how do I overcome it? And research suggests it can take years. Luckily Mrs. Melbye came up with an idea. She told me to write a story about how hard it is for me to write a story. Which was a brilliant idea, how come I’d never thought of that. But I had no time to waste, I started writing right away. But just a couple of minutes later the lesson was over.  

 

Then came Friday, our last lesson to work on the short story, which wasn’t really feeling that short anymore. I was very distracted and wasn’t really able to concentrate and most of the class was already on the peer review. I got to read Linnea’s story and it was actually really good. I didn’t know our stories had to be like that. And after reading hers my standards were pretty high and I just didn’t want to write any story, I wanted to write a good story. But when I try to make things too perfect it never works out and I end up doing nothing, which was kind of what happened this time. Whatever I was writing just didn’t seem good enough and hearing so many people saying they were finished made me get pretty stressed out. I tried to block away the noises and write, I started to really get the hang of it but as always, the lesson was over. Thankfully Mrs. Melbye had given us time till the end of the day to finish.  

 

I got home and opened up the word document but had so many distractions that I just kind of left it and honestly forget about it. And the thing with me is I procrastinate so much, and most of the time do things at the last minute. So here I am now finishing this story, which I never thought I would actually finish, but it is such a relief getting this over with. And at this point, I’m just trying to get the word count to 1,000 so I can finally be done with this. But one thing I´ve learned from writing this story is that I don’t need a super elaborate idea while starting. I can just start with something simple and turn it into an interesting story.