I know three kinds of Karate...

Jujitsu, Aikido, and regular Karate... Let's talk about Hard Eight (aka: Sydney) for a second...

Now, first and foremost, aside from Punch Drunk Love, Hard Eight is easily the Paul Thomas Anderson film with the most loveable characters, in my opinion at least.
I'd been meaning to watch this movie for quite a while after Gabe let me borrow it, but I finally got around to watching it from start to finish today. Aside from an interesting and unique story, I really liked the characters in the film, mostly because of the great relationship between Sydney and John, the two gamblers. Of course, the ironic twist of Sydney, the surrogate father, being the killer behind John's real father is what really sold me on this movie. Aside from that I've been pretty mellow today, however, I am nearly done with The Catcher in the Rye.

I've also been thinking about Gabe's story, and I started flipping around in a few of my books for various strategies to help cope with writer's block. I don't mind starting the story out or anything, but I figured that maybe Gabe might like to see a few of my favorite moves that I use to cope with writer's block. Heck, maybe other people will get a kick out of this stuff too:

• Find the place that best suits your writing: In other words, maybe you write best in front of a blaring TV with the vacuum cleaner whooshing and the phone ringing off the hook. As a writer, I often find that my worst material comes about when I'm sitting there in dead, quiet silence. With a slow atmosphere comes slow thoughts, and I need lots of loud, disturbing, shattering noise in order for my thinking to be in check with my writing.



• Ignore the Internal Editor: The Internal Editor is the dude who walks around in your mind telling you "this sentence sucks!" or "That's one heck of a crappy way to start out your paragraph there...” Ignore the little dork, just sit down and write what comes into your mind. Later on you can go back, read your work over, and then make changes where you see fit. Once, I had to write a paper for Communications class, and I was dreading it like there was no tomorrow. I just didn't want to write the paper, even though I had gotten excited about the assignment and even gone so far as to attempt writing it several times. The problem was that I would sit down to write the paper and then I'd get to think, "No that’s stupid. The teacher is going to see right through that corny sentence." Eventually, because of the deadline, I had to just write the paper if I wanted to at least get points for turning the essay in on time. Surprisingly, I did pretty well on the essay and the teacher liked it. The point is, ignore the Internal Editor, this is some of the best advice I've come across in any strategy book I've ever read.



• Do everything but write: Often, when I'm trying to write something out and I need to get thinking about how the story or essay is going to go, I do everything but write the paper. I listen to music, I walk around, I watch TV, but while doing these things I think about writing the essay and how it's going to start out, how it will develop and how it will end. Then, when I have stuff I like, I sit down and write some of it, and then I go off and do something else while I start to think about the next part I'm going to write. It can be confining for me to just sit down and expect myself to churn out 5'000 words in the blink of an eye. Unless you have a flash of inspiration, you can't even churn out 800 that way. It bothered me to no end when I found out that I couldn't sit down and write out a whole book or paper in one sitting; I had reasoned "If the great writers portrayed in film and TV can pull that off, so can I!"
  
  I can't...
  

Writer's block sucks, I've encountered it plently of times, and I hate it. You'll overcome it though, I know it.