Creativity and Writer's Block

I've pressed through the wall of impenetrability. Having expunged from my first draft of Ecclesiastes 3 all boomer-isms, I was left with nothing but blank space. My efforts this week have been focused on filling that blank space with images twenty-somethings could relate to. I have no clue if I'm close but I feel good knowing I've come up with new 28 ideas.

Artist Jasper Johns nailed it. This to me is the essence of creativity--editing, rough drafts, mutations, and the elimination of vestigial words/images. Keep adding something often enough and soon you've got something.

Without boring readers by listing all my aborted attempts at gen-y-ifying Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, I can say this:

I've chosen to lighten the mood and not post images of Hiroshima (a time to make war), MLK assassination (a time to kill), hoarding (a time to keep), or wacky faith healers (a time to heal). Even though such images would have proven good fodder for student reactions, those images are heavy handed. Mr. Q is obtuse enough without my all to obvious renderings. I'll let his lectures carry the somber tone; he doesn't need my help.

This decision of course makes hash out of 3:14, "God does all these things so that we may fear him."  Mr. Q's point in this poem about time is, "providence is loaded with example after example of oddments, conundra, and counter examples of eudaemonism." Mr. Q is whining (justifiably) about the problem of evil. My artistic sense tells me to restrain myself, go light, and save my ire at evil until later; we've still got nine more chapters of morbidity to deal with.

In addition, drawing images inspired by 2012 pop culture will unfortunately mean in three years or less my book will fall out of favor. The shelf life of humor is notoriously short, increasingly so in our day of data smog.

Yet, it still feels right to me to lighten the tone in this iconic poem with humorous images that reflect 28 experiences in the life of a university student ("a time to weep" getting a tattoo or piercing, "a time to tear" holes in the knees of one's jeans, "a time to hate" boomers like me asking gen-y folk to fix my computer, and 25 more).

If anyone is keeping track, it took four pages of mind dump to come up with 28 new thumbnail images. The toughest verbs to gen-y-ify were, "a time to plant, heal, tear down, gather stones, and give up searching." At this stage I'm leaving behind this time poem confident I'll get another chance to edit it again after letting these ideas marinate for several months as I work on the rest of the text.

Doing something to something and then doing it again until you've got something unleashes dopamine in the pleasure centers of my brain which is incredibly fun!