In fifth grade I was given an assignment to write an essay about freedom. Whatever it was that I wrote was met with an A and big smiles from my parents. I was told it was ‘very, very good.’ I think I used birds as a metaphor. Definitely flying was the imagery, because I used to swing to the ultimate height and imagine myself launched, weightless over the backyard and house. But what I remember most from that assignment was that I had satisfied some unnamed need in my teacher and parents. Their need remained mysterious but somehow, I had succeeded in satisfying it. When the next assignment arrived, I suddenly knew that I had to top the previous essay. I had to ‘live up to’ and surpass what I had done before. The new essay was something about the joy of learning. The burden of expectations guaranteed that this essay would be like a message scribbled on scrap paper, wadded into tight folds and tortured through a keyhole. Desperation and overwrought syntax were in every line. I knew even as I handed it in that I had slid from my former status of ‘has promise’ to ‘needs significant work.’ No one smiled. The grade was C. An F would have been better. It would have recognized an opposite agency. And so I entered the writer’s plight of who to please: the vast unknown and ever-changing body of readers, or the shy and wily voice that talked to itself while walking home from school. In truth, I learned how to write for the report card, but I ran rampant in my head.
What I didn’t understand in fifth grade and didn’t come to understand until I wrote in AWA workshops was that I had suffered from imposed writer’s block. When given the second assignment, I was given no agency in what I was to write about, and I was given a deadline. Furthermore, I now carried the burden of having ‘succeeded’ which meant I had unknowingly created expectations for what I produced. This is a deadly combination for an artist’s creativity. It’s much like taking that metaphorical bird and putting it in a shoebox and assuming it will still fly. What I have also come to learn in my own writing practice and in talking with other writers is that writer’s block is based essentially in fear: fear of not meeting expectations, fear of facing a subject, fear of revealing oneself, or fear of proving critics correct. The antidote to writer’s block is to release the bird. It will find its way to the sky. Our creativity is always waiting to be set loose. Once freed, the bird will sing the song it most needs to sing. And the song will live up to everything the bird hoped it would be.
Prompt Photo
