64. Blogger's block

A couple of false starts and I still couldn't get a paragraph done. It was probably because of the rugged schedule yesterday, which had me occupied by hearings for an entire day and the preparations for another trip to Davao today. This is not my first encounter with presumably a writer's block, but this is the first time I am addressing it directly by writing about it. In the past sixty three days, I have only skipped a paragraph once, due to unusually heavy workload; I feel though it was not about an inability to  write, but more of the scarcity of time to get it done. Yesterday, however, was a different case. I was shuttling between two hearings at high noon in EDSA from Quezon City to Pasay. And to relieve myself of the stressful condition of being in heavy traffic while time is ticking before the next hearing started, I tried to write a couple of lines, but there was no paragraph to be had. The same was true in the evening even as the hearings have finished.  I am reminded of Kobe Bryant's high school coach who taught him of the need to have a bread and butter shot. It's the high accuracy and all weather shot that he could make if necessary when a shot couldn't be sourced from anywhere. Kobe Bryant, whose phenomenal career as a basketball player is legendary, can make shot at will, even at the worse game situations. I watched him make two free throws shortly after his Achilles' heel popped out.  How that relates to writing the paragraph is likened to a bread and butter piece of writing -- it has to be a topic that I should be able to write about confidently and with undying inspiration, if the need arises. And the bread and butter paragraph should be the answer to the impending writer's block -- the one that I could still write even as my Achilles's heel has popped-out, so to speak.  It should be the topic of paragraph 65. 

1. One Paragraph A Day

Facebook did it. Twitter was a conspirator. They shrunk my brain. I used to write kilometric posts. Yet, for the past years, I've been confined to one-liners, two-liners at the most. My thoughts had to fit 140 characters, spaces and all. Then I had a dalliance with Sunday night  AM radio, which produced 200 podcasts. Bayan at Batas, we called it, a show in bloodied Taglish that had me chatting on a wide range of stuff from Tasadays to world history. My Kindle books have piled up from all that reading. Then, I decided enough is enough.  I'm taking a sabbatical from the broadcasts and the podcasts. I'm taking silence as a sport. I'm thinking, reflecting, calibrating the next move of this 21st century life. So today, I remember my late mentor, NVM Gonzalez, and his words about writing -- let them out into the wild, and they will find their own friends. A blog post from 2006 was discovered by a filmmaker and he said he's doing a film on it, with it (?) or inspired by it (?). Whatever it was that he said he was doing about it, it has lit up my passion for this blog again. Indeed, this blog continues to find friends long after I've left it.  Here, where my web writing adventures begun. Here, where I made enemies and friends. Here. I'm going back here. One paragraph a day. At least one paragraph a day.Yeah.

More from my wordpress blog, which I've sort of abandoned.