The Writer’s Block

Many people nowadays know writer’s block to be a blight on their creative journey.

But many, many years ago, possibly in a land far, far away, writer’s block wasn’t a blight. Oh, no… it was an asset, and a very handy one at that.

Years ago, in this distant land, everyone wrote. There was no TV, no mobile phones, no computers. In fact, there weren’t any typewriters either, so if folk wanted to write, they had to, well, write.

The thing is, back then and over there, everyone had to write on scrolls of paper, with real ink and a quill. Everyone did it, which is fine, only some were more particular than others, and embellished their carefully crafted words with curly and extreme flourishes. They’d spend hours making their Ls look R-like whilst still keeping the essence of the L. As for the Ws, well, one can only imagine what they did with them.

The problem, however, wasn’t with the lettering. It was with what they were writing on: the scroll. They’d get halfway up the upstroke, and the paper would roll down, spoiling the flow, blotting the ink, and sometimes adding a blotch of ink on the back of the paper, which in those prim and proper days would be a no-no.

To get around this problem, the folk took drastic measures into their own hands. They’d try to trap the paper in drawers or under chairs, and in some cases they’d lean across the paper to keep it flat. None of these were a solution.

Somebody went to the nearest stream, and selected two pebbles, blue-grey in colour. They dried them thoroughly, and then used them to hold the paper down. They were heavy enough to hold it down, yet light enough to move should their L upstroke reach the part of the paper that was beneath their pebble, causing a block.

Eventually, over time, the pebbles became known as paper weights, but in the early days they were known as writer’s blocks, blocks for keeping the paper flat, and then blocks for extreme embellishments.

And there you have it. Writer’s block used to be a valuable asset.