Welcome to this month’s edition of the Merry Go Round Blog Tour where we’ll discuss blocks.  I personally prefer the different colored and shaped wooden building blocks we used to give kids.  My dad found a new take on the old blocks for his great grand-daughter — they’re made from a lightweight solid plastic that looks like wood.  The advantage? They don’t hurt your feet when you step on them, and they don’t hurt other kid’s heads if your toddler bonks his or her neighbor on the head with them (my grand-niece, at four years old, is, thankfully, beyond that stage).

Or maybe blocking someone on a social media site?  I’m not into blocking, but I will do it for an obvious spam site that decides to follow me.  There are other criteria, but it’s a feature I use sparingly.

Since this blog tour focuses on writing, what they really mean with this topic is the subject of writer’s block. Which is when a writer stares at a blank page and just can’t put any words of consequence on it.  I prefer to say it’s all in the writer’s head and it doesn’t really exist, but I have experienced, shall we say, slow downs during my writing efforts.  I attribute them to fear of being unable to capture the vision in my head in appropriate words.  That’s a very real fear, but writers will always fail to capture the magic that spins in their heads.  Mere words cannot envelop the full concept our minds conceive, so we have to do the best we can.  This important thing to remember (and it works for a current project) is we have to try.  If we get some words on paper (or, in most of our cases now, into an electronic file), we can refile those words and capture a little more of the essence of our vision.  But if we never put those words on paper, we can’t even do that.

So, I believe, for most of us, the more effective way to deal with blockages is to write something, even if it’s bad.  (My challenge comes during the revision process, because, eventually, you have decide it’s good enough or you scrap the project.)