Writer in Absentia — The Pause Between Drafts

Originally published July 2013 as “The Writer’s Block: The Process of Creative Distraction.”
Revisited and refined in 2025 — a meditation on the evolving voice of the writer.

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Lest my posts go unnoticed, my writing has taken a leave of absence.

Every week for five months straight, I wrote — about something. About me, family, the digital dance of social media, even a few pieces that found their way to Yahoo Voices. Then, without warning, the tempo changed. My words slowed, the cadence faltered, and I found myself staring at an empty page as though it were an uncooperative lover. The writer’s block affliction had arrived.

Writers often describe this condition as a kind of muscle fatigue — an atrophy of imagination that sneaks in precisely when the pen feels most alive. The paralysis of silence is dreaded, yes, but it is also diagnostic. It tells you something is shifting. The first step to recovery is confession: I am blocked. The cure, if we can call it that, is to stay open to what the silence is trying to teach.

For me, writer’s block feels like a temporary restraint on thought — as if my inner voice has gone off-grid. I wonder if other writers share this strange disconnect: when you question your own credibility, when you flirt with your craft and wonder if it still desires you back. These doubts gnaw at me even as I know the truth — that block happens more often than brilliance.

The Diagnosis of Silence

In searching for perspective, I came across The 10 Types of Writer’s Block and How to Overcome Them. Two lines spoke directly to my anxious mind:

1. “You can’t come up with an idea” — that moment of blank-page paralysis.
10. “You’re revising your work, trapped inside the text you already wrote.”

The writer’s reassurance: this is not a failure of talent but the natural process of diagnosis.

The Courtship with the Pen

When I first began blogging in December 2012, it was simply to vent — to find sanctuary from chaos. Writing became my place of confession and, ultimately, of healing. It introduced me to my own emotional landscape and gave me language for my turbulence.

The relationship with my pen remains the most intimate one I know. Writing is where I am most honest, most unguarded, most myself. It is not a performance but a pulse — a conversation between solitude and soul. My phrasing, my rhythm, my pauses — all of it is uniquely my own DNA.

Creative Gestation

As I continue to evolve as a writer, I accept that creativity travels in cycles: rush and restraint, inspiration and incubation. The block, though maddening, is the pause between drafts of becoming. Revision, recreation, redraft, redo — this is the oxygen of the creative life.

Every thought is an idea in waiting. Even silence germinates sentences. So I have stopped fearing the drought.

Writer’s block, as I’ve come to see it, is not an enemy — it’s gestation. A pause that refines, re-centers, and readies the next bloom. It’s pure creative distraction.