Andromeda – democracy – dentist. Writers block has a way of making you feel useless; hopeless even. Staring at a trio of imaginative and diverse prompts and still shooting blanks. Feeling like the plot-line is hiding just out of sight, like so many woodland creatures scurrying frustratingly in and out of the periphery of your vision as your camera hangs limply around your neck, hoping to serve, but not being able to. It feels like walking into your own kitchen, and happening upon a bowl, a microwave and a can of soup – and yet having no idea how to usefully combine the three. You’re in familiar territory: oh yes, you write often and fast, and you enjoy doing it. Some even say you write well, and deep down you agree. The thrill of creating worlds, of stretching language to fit your own designs and machinations. You can be a murderer, a nun, an inanimate object even – live countless lives exactly how you wish and over an infinite time-scale. And yet today: nothing. How can my mind by so cruel? How can I be denied my opiate?
Approaching a deadline can be like experiencing the dark world of the night, when I'm lying in bed unable to sleep because every noise is magnified: every creak represents some unknown, unknowable terror creeping closer to my bed one heavy, menacing step at a time. How different it is to that luxurious world of half sleep in the morning: when you've woken up earlier than you need, and so begin falling back into the dreamworld. The halfway house before you sleep, when every noise is a seed, germinating into a watery fantasy; no logical progression or tangible evidence here – just a realm of unbridled, but mostly happy, madness. It’s no democracy of logical thoughts, either: it’s a benevolent dictatorship run by the most strange and out-of-place ideas of which a person is capable.
In this magical realm, and to its only observer, a dentist can go anywhere, do anything, become; anything – but not to one with writers block. Nope. To him, the character is flat and wooden. He’s defined by his job title, not by those little habits, emotions, and flaws that make the rest of us. Not by monsters and glory and pain and suffering. He’s just a dentist. And how much fun can that be for a reader? How much fun can it be for a writer, for that matter?
It’s unsettling, in the same way it’s odd that ‘Andromeda’ is the label given to an unremarkable plant, but also an unimaginably vast swirling mass of stars and planets, that will one day collide with our own swirling mass. How can the same word adequately represent both extremes? How can a mind achieve sometimes so much, and sometimes so little?
But then, as I look down after countless hours of frustration and mental self-flagellation, there it is: a piping hot bowl of soup. Andromeda – democracy – dentist.
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