On Discipline

"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work".

Flaubert

I am currently searching about William Styron. He had this quote pasted on his work desk.

I too have been thinking on similar lines for the past few weeks now. Because, it's now been too long- almost an year- since I first started toying with the idea of a novel. I've started writing it a few times, but abandoned it after just a few pages. The idea, though, has not left me. Instead, it's been developing, evolving each moment, without any conscious effort from my side. That voice has just been there, at the back of my head, all this while. Talking to me, giving me its perspective on each and every thing that's been happening around. Anything I see, or think, that voice tells me how it could contribute to the novel. It's been one continuous thinking process, over a whole year. It's been one intense thinking process, to the extent that it clouded everything else. It's been as if I've been walking in a daze, conscious and yet not quite awake. I've been getting more and more absent minded, and getting more accepting of such a state of mind as 'normal.'

I know that I just have to write, and get it all out, if I am to get over this state of brooding. I know that. And yet, it's not coming out!

I sit on the computer, open a blank word document, close my eyes for a minute, and try to concentrate. I am going to start writing. In a minute. Ok. 'The moment' is still a minute away. I open my eyes. I open google. I open yahoomail. I open orkut. I am just going to check what's up. Then, I will return to the blank page. It'll just be a few minutes. I promise. I check them. I close them. As promised. Then, just as I am going to close the google page, I think of a writer who I should search on. What was he doing when he was my age? Did he too have the same dilemmas? I enter his name, an information deluge floods in. I read one page, then another, then another. Follow one link to the next, land on to another interesting writer or artist or book or anything. Then, from there to something else. When I start feeling tired, too tired to carry on, that is when the urge to write returns. But, by then, I no longer have the energy. So, I write down the idea on the blank page, and save it. I will come to it the next day, and write the story it carries in its womb. Its a promise.

My folder is full of such germs of ideas.

Each time I read them, I can't help feeling sorry. I should have finished that story then! It would have made such a good read! Now, I can't write it, because I am no longer in that frame of mind.

Yet, day after day after day, I leave stories unfinished.

Is this what they call the 'writer's block'?

Did I get it even before I became a writer?