Writing Control Kit

(audio for this essay is at the end)

There is a beach near me that has several signs along the path to the sand, warning about the presence of great white sharks. There aren’t a lot of great white sharks in Maine (though there are some), and whoever made these signs wanted to make sure any skeptical New Englanders took this matter seriously, so they installed a very obvious BLEEDING CONTROL KIT near the entrance of the beach. A graphical way of bonking us on the head, to make sure we get it. Plus also, I suppose, a way to control the bleeding.

Now, not to make light of shark attacks (scary!) but it made me think about what other metaphorical bleeding control kits we might need in our lives, our creative lives especially. When else might we need an obvious and necessary intervention? What would be in your WRITING CONTROL KIT?

(I was going to call it the “Writer’s Block Control Kit” but I’m of the opinion that writer’s block stems mainly from an inability to let yourself be terrible on the page. It comes from not letting yourself be bored, not letting yourself be willing to fail over and over again on the way to story success. And as we all know, the writing is the biggest thing we can control, and when we’ve waded into shark-infested waters in our writing life, it’s time to take back control.)

Maybe you have given yourself warning signs on the way to getting your writing done. “Stay off social media and the internet!” you tell yourself. “Write for an hour as soon as I wake up! Finish this draft by Friday! Don’t answer emails until after the writing gets done! Ten pages by Monday! And stay off social media and the internet!”

But you ignore those signs. You need to catch yourself at the entrance to the beach, before you cavalierly walk into the water.