WRITER'S BLOCK 

I sit on a table, arms by my side, laptop screen open and blank. Somewhere in the quiet hush of the room, a fly zips across the room, an incessant hum. My mind, numb, searches the white noise in my brain for something, anything to put on the paper. This crippling stubbornness, conscious or not, drives me mad. To compensate, I spew everything out, truly embracing the “shitty first draft.” My ideas, they flow from neuron to neuron, the synapses in the brain firing a million miles an hour, my poor fumbling fingers struggling to keep up (yet another small part pays heed to the hubbub in the room, wondering how my neighbor— whose nails are a mile long— manages to type faster than me, only prompting me to feel self-conscious about my own typing in this quiet, quiet room -- am I breathing too loudly aaaannnnd I’m off topic. It’s ok, I’ll edit it in post.) My thoughts wander, jumping from idea to idea, and I take it all down, or at least as much as I can. Who knows what may work later?

​

Later. I write for the later. I write for the final product, the crisp white pages tacked together with a single silver staple. The name, my name, written across the top. The later motivates the now, encourages me to write something in hopes of creating that beautiful product. The buzzing flies of random thoughts I found so distracting at the beginning metamorphosize in some nature-defying, unearthly act into beautiful butterflies. Sprawling ideas connect delicately like the inky black threads in the monarch’s tangy orange wings. The fluttery insect, fresh and wet from its cocoon of intense edits crawls out renewed and reformed. It flies from flower to flower, spreading seeds of thought across genres, from biochemistry to children’s literature and back again. The cross pollination breeds diversity of thought in my mind and forms new neural networks chalked full of ideas for future pieces. Writing becomes a positive feedback loop, each piece prompting ideas for another.  I write to turn the flies into butterflies, to make sense of my mind and our world.

 

The flies seek solace in the warm confines of my yellow notebook, unlined as to uninhibit my ideas, to encourage arrows across the page, from beginnings to ends. I decorate my journal with the sporadic entries detailing my most busy days, the occasional page of practice calligraphy, and the sheets of amino acid structures memorized for biochemistry. The cream pages, flecked with ink, map my thoughts, each entry a destination in the landscape of my mind. Some ideas continuously flit across my mind, teasing me with their colorful wings, and I nurture the repetition. Not every cherry pit springs an orchard of cherry blossoms, and not every idea in my journal turns into a written masterpiece. In the survival of the fittest, I cherry-pick through my thoughts, sifting through the collection of ideas, searching for cohesion. Across my entries I looked for conglomeration, a building potential for a new project.

​

Most recently, I saw several entries swirl together into a young adult novel. I decided to embrace the emerging bud of ideas. I wrote pages of prose, poetry, and illustrations to challenge my writing abilities; the novel served as a place of great experimentation. As an Indian American, I grew up reading stories written about white characters rescuing their white friends. My experiences in young adult literature prompted me to include characters from various backgrounds. With my writing, I actively contributed to filling a gap in society. I additionally wanted my characters to represent the convergence of two spheres of thought, art and science akin to the processes in my mind. Faiyaz and Isobel, both young teenagers therefore harbor severe passions for either writing or science. Though they start as complete strangers, their blossoming relationship amalgamates their diverse interests. Their transformations as characters exemplifies the my experiences, a reformation of thought.  

​

As I had never previously attempted a project of such volume, connecting the ideas proved challenging. One scene jumped to another to another to another, but wait we were back at the second one now, but it connects so beautifully with the fourth. So the later swoops in and solders the emerging connections, seeks the budding relationships. I filtered through the chaos, each subsequent sweep with a finer and finer mesh to retain pieces most relevant to the plot. From the fine threads of thought in my mind, I spun the web of Port Lapis. My book characterizes my journey as a writer and my reasons for writing, from the themes I twist into the plot to the very words themselves.

 

I still sit at the table, hands resting calmly on the keys of my laptop, the screen no longer blank. My neighbor has long since packed up, and the room is strangely quiet without the clicking of nails on keys. Outside, the sun has dipped behind the spikes of the shingled roof. Holstering my bag on one shoulder, I step out into the fresh air. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a butterfly.

​

​

​