By Marianne McBrearty

Anxiety rips through the mind, storms gather inside the thoughts of getting those first words down. The writer then puts up the roadblocks, temporary traffic lights and has all their creativity sitting in traffic waiting for the light to turn green. As the hours and days pass by, even successful writers can extend that traffic queue back years – they might get rid of the electronic traffic lights and employ the hi-vis jacket man with the flip sign that says ‘Go’ ‘Stop’! The weight of the words starts to pile up feelings like concrete they can’t carry anymore, abandoned, if only bulldozers can manoeuvre them. The writer finds ways to delay sitting at the laptop, or open the notebook, as there is always that last episode to watch or that mate who needs some friendly advice tonight – so we might as well go for some drinks. Of course, it helps with the writing, you know meeting people, conversation, you convince yourself, just like you said to yourself last week. 

What is that word ‘Block’ – that has caused terror on the writer’s desk. There are the extremities of writer’s block where a writer can simply decide to abandon their career as a writer, switch course in life or maybe they created the masterpiece so early on not much else flowed the same way after that. Harper Lee spent years in absence of her writing after the success of To Kill A Mockingbird, it would be 55 years later when she released her second novel. Yet to think of the word ‘Block’ as an American English word, the definition is more comforting as the distance from one street to the next. It conjures up families, friendships, lovers, enemies, communities, societies, neighbours, schools, shops, places of worship, hospitals, languages, complete treasures inside every block of the neighbourhood filled with stories for the ambitious writer. The word Block should be embraced. It should be a go-to-place, where writers can search to find their characters, descriptions, and dialogue. They should build their block on their desk, brick by brick, created just as their world will transform onto their page. Whether they are creating a novel, script, poetry – layering each brick, forming what their block will transform into, the characters that live there, the genre, the words then start to seep onto the pages. 

When the artist has control over their blocks, they start to see how its form sits crafted together. For ancient Celt dry stone wall building, crafters used similar techniques to create their walls. With the lack of binding material to set each stone together, they built the bricks together like an artform. They cleverly would look at each shape of the stone and see which ones would sit together, giving the wall its strength, form and shape. They would chisel away at a block to create the shapes needed to fit and build walls with great lengths such as Haiden’s wall in AD117 that it is believed to have taken 6 years in completion. As the Celt stone wall makers, Victor Hugo took 15 years crafting and shaping his writing of Les Misérables, constructing his masterpiece equally with great strength and precision.