Quite Frankly: Drawing a blank

Approximately three weeks ago I was banging my head against my kitchen table trying to knock something loose. And nothing was coming.

My boss had offered me the chance to write a weekly film column to run alongside the synopses of all of the movies playing at local theater — and already we must pause to acknowledge all of the ways in which this story could have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

There are a great many things about which I know absolutely nothing — politics, auto care and backgammon, just to name a few — but she picked movies, the one island in a sea of shallow waters.

Mine were the grandest of plans. I would do previews, reviews and in-depth critical analyses. Today it was the Weekender. Tomorrow, the world!

And all that I had to do was write the first one.

My body sat down at the table, turned on the laptop and even opened a word document for good measure, at which point, per the previously agreed upon division of labor, my brain was supposed take over for the heavy lifting.

But it never showed.

All of my life I had been boring people silly with unsolicited factoids about “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “Tootsie” and now when it really counted, I was coming up empty.

How to describe writer’s block when writing is what you are paid to do?

Imagine blanking on your lines in the middle of the big scene in the school play. You think that’s about as bad as things can get, only you look down and realize that you forgot to get dressed this morning and there’s a draft in the auditorium, which due to the audience’s stunned silence, is completely quiet except for the electronic hum of about a dozen video cameras recording your embarrassment for all of posterity.

It’s like that.

So anyway, there I was in my kitchen, gently smacking my forehead against a faux-wood countertop, trying to think of something intelligible that I could write about backgammon.

You have to understand that I wasn’t asking for entire paragraphs to arrive whole cloth. I would have settled for a sentence, a phrase, a word — heck, at that stage in the game even a punctuation mark would have been something that I could have at least built off of to one effect or another.

In all fairness, maybe I was doing it wrong. It’s never wise to be haphazard about your idioms. I have to believe “banging my head against the wall” caught on for a reason, but in my apartment I own the table and rent the wall, so pragmatism won out over tradition.

Eventually the column got written by sheer virtue of the fact that it had to be. For all the navel gazing and head scratching it’s nice to come back to something as simple as that.

I’m searching for a bow to put on this, a neat, tidy little ending that gives the piece a bottom or at least an artificial substitute for profundity.

Another blank.

This story was originally published February 20, 2016 at 6:43 PM with the headline "Quite Frankly: Drawing a blank."