This afternoon my landlord, a hero of a guy, is in my bathroom plunging the sink. It’s been a slow drainer for months. Over that time, I’ve used gallons of deadly stuff that comes in unwieldy plastic bottles with skull and crossbones images on the label. Still, the sink won’t open.
As I was kibitzing over Scott’s shoulder, it came to me that this stuckness in the drain is a beautiful, albeit sludgy, metaphor for what happens to my writing occasionally. You know, how slowly and reluctantly the words sometimes come, how they sometimes don’t come at all. I try all manner of tricks to get the writing flowing again—staring at the screen or the page, writing one (wrong) word or another, rewriting what I’ve just written, going back to the beginning of the page, the paragraph, the sentence, and starting over, getting up and moving away from my desk, getting a glass of water, hitting the stash of almonds, taking a walk, taking a shower, taking a nap. Coffee! Still, nothing.