Writer's Block

If you couldn't tell from the massive chronological gaps that tend to fall between my posts and kind of resemble the ever-elusive fossil records of missing links, I am not exactly immune to writer's block. Okay, well, in that case it's more of a lack of ignition fuel rather than a failure to finish a thought, but what's the difference?

Right now, I'm trying to write a rough draft of a creatively formatted argumentative essay. First things first, I am not into creative arguments. I like to say what I have to say and own my words. The whole idea of giving my thoughts to a fictional character smacks too closely of ventriloquism, and I am not a ventriloquist. I can't do the "speaking with my mouth shut" thing. Plus, it takes twice the brain power because I have to attend to the balance of two simultaneous threads. One is the meat of my argument and one is the personality of my character. Is it obviously distinct? Appropriately gruff? Can you stomach his argument even though he's a bit of a snob? I like a world in which the quality of an idea determines its ability to be received rather than the character of its proponent, but the Sophists demonstrated that my world is an idealistic fantasy rather than a likelihood.

So second things second, I am stuck. Calling everybody stupid is not a good way to make them like your character. And I have realized that my understanding of the past is extremely biased because the people who have been elected to represent various eras are, generally, those who were more cultured. Writing was not a middle class profession in the 1700s because they barely had a middle class. So how can I judge the present state of education in classical knowledge when the reality is that it probably hasn't changed that much? Sure, C.S. Lewis can toss out references in French and Latin without bothering to translate them in his Allegory of Love, but chances are decent that he had a far better education than most young men of his time, and he was an academician writing to other academicians so he could afford to assume that his audience would understand.

Where does that leave me? With the startling revelation that my topic is crap. Baseless, structureless crap that I am forcing a misshapen, ill-formed character to surround himself with so that I can write an argumentative essay. No wonder I have writer's block. It was just a matter of time.