As we continue our week of celebration of our readers, we read a blog entry by novelist Candace Knoebel entitled “Caught In The Writer’s Block Web,” where she offers some great tips to avoid getting writer’s block, which she hopefully did not have when she’s wrote her blog entry. Because if you have writer’s block and are able to write about writer’s block, do you really have writer’s block? We’ll leave that question to the 15th century philosophers once the time machines are invented.
She also calls writer’s block a metaphorical “spider.” Coincidentally we call writer’s block “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Come on, really, Marvel/Disney/Sony, the tag line is “The Untold Story Begins” when you just began the story, for yet another time, 10 years ago with Toby Maguire! The real cause of Hollywood writer’s block is in the studio heads who keep recycling the same stories again and again, blocking many new writers with original ideas from getting their stories told on-screen.
Unfortunately the author of this Van Halen themed menu did not have writer’s block.
Fortunately, we at NotTheWorstNews never get writer’s block because we write about funny stories, including those in the news, and there will never be a shortage of those as long as California men are trying to kill spiders with blowtorches, as we first wrote about here. Legal disclaimer: do not try to use real blowtorches to kill spiders, or metaphorical spiders, or writer’s block!
Still, for all the writers out there who may have writer’s block right now, remember, it could be worse. In fact, here are:
3 Worse Things Than Having Writer’s Block
1. Being a member of NKOTBSB, the combined group of former pop sensations New Kids On The Block and The Back Street Boys and having writer’s block. While we don’t know whether these groups officially merged into one band, or just went on tour together, neither group has had a number one hit since the BSB recorded something called “Incomplete” which was a #1 hit in Australia in 2005! We’ve never heard this song, but if the title was “Incomplete” because nobody could complete the song due to writer’s block, seven-year Writer’s Block could be a serious problem for any attempt at a follow-up hit called “The Second Half Of That Song We Never Finished That Everyone In Australia Loves.” Still, if you do have seven year’s of writer’s block, remember it could be worse, as it took W. Axl Rose 55 years to complete the Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy, and he’s only 50 years old!
2. Having a dream of a great idea for a fiction story, and waking up and thinking “that would be an awesome movie!” And then forgetting the entire dream seconds later before you can get to a computer or Four Points By Sheraton notepad to make some notes. Later, while sitting on an airplane, the place Hollywood sends bad movies to squeak out the final pennies of revenue, (because it’s not like many passengers strapped to a seat have much else to do on a 13 hour flight from Tokyo than watch bad movies), you remember your dream. Specifically, while watching the in-flight latest Martin Lawrence cross-dressing movie “Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son” you realize that your “dream” was actually remembering this particular movie that you saw, but forgot while you were drunk on your original flight to Tokyo.
3. Writing 50 Novels in the 50 Shades of Grey series. Perhaps those of you with writer’s block have “standards” and spend time “thinking” about original things to write. We guess it’s hard to get writer’s block when what you’re writing isn’t good in the first place, since you can just write the first thing involving handcuffs and grey-haired men you think of, and people will collectively pay millions of dollars for it! We can only guess that, because, despite mocking 50 Shades of Grey twice this week, we’ve never actually read any part of this series of books. We just assume they’re poorly written, in part because the author uses a pseudonym as if to acknowledge 50 shames of dismay from her family members, and in part because critics label it as “Mommy Porn”, a section that we try to avoid at the local library. And because of these assumptions, we also assume there’s no reason to read any of these books, as we’ll be forced to watch the equally-likely-to-be-bad movie version of each novel while strapped to a seat of an airplane.
Good luck to all writers out there! Fight those metaphorical spiders with a metaphorical (not real) blowtorch, and check out our final entry in reader appreciation week tomorrow!