My writing routine includes a Mac book and an empty Word document. Slowly, but surely, the screen intermittently fills with letters, creating a peppered portrait. At least that’s what used to happen before you came along, Writer’s Block. Ever since my release from college a month ago I’ve undergone a painful case of writer’s block. It’s time for confrontation.

Dear Writer’s Block,

I’ve tried everything: changing my atmosphere, hosting writing workshops on my porch, reading, doodling, listening to the radio, book clubs, events, and writing (gasp). The change in atmosphere only creates a drifting mind and, when applicable, intense sessions of people-watching and inner dialogue. Writing workshop turns into a wine manifesto, events are fun but mindless, and writing turns into illegible babble.

What else can I do, Writer’s Block?

Buy a typewriter, you say? Why yes, a quaint typing machine that clicks and clacks should do the trick. A vintage toy that makes the sweetest of sounds, is irresistible to touch and impossible to ignore. Typewriters don’t have Facebook or Google. Typewriters don’t have iTunes or colorful, distracting screens. Typewriters help you get right to the point … Write. To. The. Point.

Thank you, Writer’s Block, for understanding. I’m currently waiting, rather impatiently, to... more »

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”–Joan Didion, from the essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”

My first notebook came to me as a Christmas gift from my sister when I was six. She had made it in a crafts class at the junior high, and it was pink, with multicolored paper pages and the word “diary” stamped in gold on the front cover. Though I wrote in it sporadically, I didn’t start keeping a faithful journal until the winter of my freshman year of high school. Writing in a notebook is a practice I’ve kept up with, more or less regularly, since starting that random February day. I keep twelve years’ worth of notebooks in a large red storage bin in my closet here in Boston. About once a year, on some rainy Saturday, I’ll pull one out and start reading. Half-forgotten memories can pull me in, sometimes for hours at a time, but mostly I tire of myself quickly and put it all away in disgust. But I would never throw them away.

In... more »