I imagine people with writer’s block feeling unable to think of something to write about. I haven’t had that problem, but I’ve had something where I have too many things I want to write about and I feel unable to focus on one for sustained periods, and it feels like writer’s block in that I feel stuck. I keep becoming interested in one of the other things and my motivation keeps changing or disappearing and it usually takes something major from outside, like a book contract, for me to finally focus on one thing.

I don’t put myself into that situation. I play and discover. You have to imagine a kid in a sandbox. You’re just having fun. You’re not expecting anything; you’re not looking for anything. You’re not following a trend; you don’t do something that needs to be similar to something else. It is actually from within yourself, which is endless. It’s like a kaleidoscope—you shake it and you have a bunch of new ways of doing things. So I think this block only happens to people who expect something, or who want something or are chasing something or who are trying to write something that sells or whatever. If you don’t look at all of these aspects, if you’re just having fun with notes, it doesn’t happen.

It’s very challenging working through it, but I think my stutter teaches me how to work through it. One of the things that it teaches me is when the block is happening, it presents an opportunity for another kind of encounter, another kind of beauty, and another kind of intimacy. The story that I often tell, and it’s just one of many examples, but this one time I was at a Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Brooklyn. I was in line and I went up to order my food. I got through my order, it’s very busy, there’s people lined up behind me and then the person asked me my name, and I block on my name. The person taking my order just stood there and waited so kindly, very gently. I felt so safe with them. I’m blocking, I’m blocking, and there’s nothing coming out. At a certain point, they were like, “You can just tell me the first letter if you want.” And I couldn’t say that. So we just stood there, I don’t know maybe 15, 30 seconds, and then I said my name, and then we went on. To me, it was so beautiful. Me and this person who I may never see again, whose name I do not know, we shared this interval of silence. It was just so beautiful and so intimate and so vulnerable. Vulnerable probably because other instances I have people will say, “Oh, did you forget your name?” Or they’ll laugh. There are many ways that people react to me stuttering up my name, some of which have been very painful. With that particular interaction, the block enabled this specific exchange between the two of us that probably would not have happened if I didn’t stutter my name.

I just let it sit there. Yeah, I do get it. It’s more like ideas come in waves and I don’t try and force it. Although I haven’t for a while. In the past year and a half, I can’t keep up with the ideas. I have a lot of ideas, and that’s a great feeling. It hasn’t been this way for a long time.