The most frustrating thing about writer's block for a blog is having a hard time trying to find something worthwhile to write about without tearing your hair out or pissing off any potential readers you might want to pick up. Usually I know when I've hit a roadblock when I want to write an essay about writing. This is key to remember since Writing About Writing is my least favorite genre of writing. The only exception to this is writing advice books. Even then, most of what's out there is either regurgitated from other better books on the subject or just the author laying out their own quirks and prejudices. The biggest offenders on my Writing About Writing shit-list are those books starring writers as main characters. You see this all the time with all sorts of writers. I get you should "write what you know" if you're getting started but for fuck's sake, there's a point where you have to grow up and move on to talking about other professions. It's one of the reasons I can't get into Stephen King (most of his protags are writers) despite being impressed with his ability to come up with creepy shit with such regularity. It's a reason why I don't care about checking out most of the books I've read reviews about during the last 10 years. It's tiresome. Write about electricians or bricklayers or (god help us) cybersecurity analysts as your main characters. That'll at least be something novel enough to be interesting if you pull it off.
Maybe things have gotten better and I'm completely off the mark. It has been a while since I've seriously noticed that writers had taken over the world of (non-genre) fiction as main characters. I hope I'm wrong. I really don't want to be bothered with resorting to thinking about Writing About Writing ever again unless I'm covering something specific, like pilcrows or nuances in editing. This is it. Last time. Never again.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Side Note...
Luckily, doing a quick search before this rant lead to a good resource provided by someone on Reddit called u/elonmartianmusk (😒) that has a large trove of GRE essay prompts compiled into one Excel generator spreadsheet. Think I might start using some of these going forward to kickstart the ol' writing brain. I've posted the file below - already scanned for viruses, btw - in case you all would like a copy too:
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