Talker's Block

Seth Grodin's  column on "Talker's Block" hit home for me today.

He writes:
"No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
"Why then, is writer's block endemic?"

Writing is a part of my life: I work with a community of writers in my English class.  I belong to a Writers Group.  I have a few friends who have blogs, and lots of people chatter away on Facebook.  This latter category, I believe, plays into this admonition:

"Writer's block isn't hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better."

He advises that everyone should have a blog or use Tumblr or something on that order and he suggests that the comments should be turned off, because "you don't need more criticism, you need more writing."

I like this column of his.  Every time Writers Group rolls around, I've about convinced myself that it's an idea that has played itself out, that we are a bunch of post-grads trying to act as if we are still in grad school with its combined burst of energy and exhaustion.  Then I go to group, and find out how exhilarating it is to be around those who write and even though none of us seems to be writing every day, we are writing. 

Which is exactly Grodin's point.