Last night I was rereading Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird when I came across something that annoyed me. Anne says everyone will be stricken by writer’s block at some point in their creative pursuits. I choose to call it what it is: Writer’s Laziness, Writer’s Procrastination, Writer’s Emptiness, or sometimes, Writer’s Raging Case of Perfectionism.

I have never had a supernatural force preventing me from working. I have, on a regular basis decided I didn’t feel like writing (laziness), or I had nothing to say (emptiness), or I had 42 dozen other essential things to accomplish before I could write (procrastination), or that my writing sucks anyway (perfectionism).

I call bullshit on writer’s block because the very name takes the responsibility of production off the writer. If I’m calling myself blocked, that means something else – something external – is preventing me from writing. For example, if I locked myself out of my apartment, or if a mudslide takes out the road and leaves me stuck at work. Those are blocks, if I forgot to carry a notebook with me.

I like to pretend that I’m at least partially in control of my life, so I don’t like to believe in a mystical something stopping me from sitting down at the computer and typing. If I have nothing to say, it’s because I’ve done nothing interesting lately and it’s time to get out of the house. If I can’t convince my dumb ass to sit down and start writing, that’s not a block. That’s just me, choosing not to write.

Writing crap is acceptable. I can edit crap. Sometimes, like in those news stories that pop up now and again about a dog eating someone’s diamond ring, I can clean the crap off my writing and there’s a diamond (those moments are rare). The one thing I can’t edit is a blank page.

Just to contradict myself, I’ll admit that I do believe in project block. That’s when you’ve written yourself onto the edge of the chasm and haven’t figured out how to write yourself off. Today, my variation on this theme was writing in a circle around a sensitive topic for me. I need to write straight through the middle, but that wasn’t happening, so after completing a bunch of random notes, I’ve moved on to writing this post. Sometimes, it’s just not the right time for a project. My solution is to have more than one project in process at a time.

“The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.”

Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird