A writer's greatest enemy comes neither in the form of ignorance, nor in the form of creative block. It comes neither in the form of arrogance, nor in the form of plagiarists watching his every move.
Having been through a weary two-year hiatus almost ten years ago, and having slogged through the last few days of my life, I now know this: A writer's greatest enemy is fatigue.
The more tired you are, the harder it is to write. You can't think when your mind is weary from the day's work. You can't deduce anything when your mental clock is telling you to sleep. You can't juggle concepts when your hands have withered at your sides.
You can try, mind you. You can grab an clean sheet of notebook paper, roll some parchment into the typewriter, open up a new instance of Microsoft Word. But if my experience is any indication of the fact, you're likely to go only a few sentences before your frontal lobe starts shutting down.
Sometimes if you're drowsy enough,
You even start
Splitting your paragraphs
Just
Like
This.
...
...And somewhere in the back of your mind, it all seems to make sense, for some reason.
Fatigued writing is an author's drunkenness. We have no idea what we write in the evening, and then wake up in the morning with nothing but a bad headache and some lingering regrets.
Perhaps tomorrow morning I'll read this and wonder just what I was thinking.
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