HIATUS: a break or interruption in the continuity of a work, series, or action

Sometimes you welcome them and celebrate their presence. At other times they impose themselves upon you and bring some pain and suffering. Relatives or "long lost friends?" No, I'm talking about those breaks which interrupt the flow of creative juices. The word for them is hiatus.

They happen almost without warning. You get up at the regular hour, go through the normal pre-writing routines, stretch your arms and fingers... and then *@%#$. It isn't there. Nothing comes to your mind. You are blank. Words which usually flow freely are frozen in wordspace. A hiatus attack has taken place, and there is no software program which will prevent it, search it out and destroy it, or neutralize it. You've been hit, and the damage has been done.

Thankfully, hiatus assumes that a gap exists. Therefore, there is an end to the previous flow of creativity and the beginning of another season of writing. The hiatus you have entered is not the end of writing...it is only a break.

There is no standard amount of time for a hiatus. Maybe it's a few seconds, hours, or days. Some writers talk about going through years when the creativity doesn't flow, but that's not a gap...that's a crisis! Some writers refer to it as "writer's block" but that makes it sound as if it only happens to writers. It is a very familiar phenomenon to artists, musicians, speech writers, and others in the creative industry.

I am not in a hiatus right now. To the contrary, I have great energy about my daily writing. Several fellow bloggers have said, "How long are you going to keep up the daily blog? When are you going to get serious and realize that you can't write every day?" I don't have a good answer for them, because the possibility of it seems so foreign that I can't imagine it happening in this venue.

I collect words. Literally. Every day I capture a few new words and record them on a list in my cellphone. I keep Post-Its at my desk. I collect newspaper and magazine articles which inspire me. I think the secret to it is to keep reading, keep listening, and staying open to fresh material.

My biggest problem on a daily basis is making a decision about which word I'm going to pursue that day. I'm very attentive to politics and the issues surrounding political situations. But I recognize that some people get tired of political talk, so I try to limit my obsession with politics to a couple or few days a week.

And, as you have guessed if you've been reading this blog, I like to pursue words and their meaning. I'm not nearly as sophisticated in that genre of postings as some of the wordsmiths writing blogs that I read daily. (I'm learning a great deal from them.) I'm more interested in the way that certain words inspire a train of thought. Like hiatus, for instance. Instead of spending a whole posting on the derivation of the word and its multiple meanings, I like to take this kind of a spin-out and explore the way the word leads me to an interesting place. For me, it's more about the trail than the arrival.

So, no...I'm not announcing a hiatus in publishing this blog. The changes I have been telling you are coming are not about frequency or abandonment. They are about visual changes and format changes which will allow me greater flexibility. They are about expanding my universe through the use of new cyber tools. The changes are almost complete. I need a tutorial in their use, and then...bang!!!...one day next week you will open this site and see something new.

Right now, however, I'm going to declare a hiatus and read the local paper.

Photo Credit: dctobc.com/2009/04/hiatus/