A fellow writer once described his struggle to me in the most visceral terms possible.
“Imagine you are seated on the commode,” he said, his voice thick with genuine misery. “You are trying to expel your body’s waste, but nothing moves. That is how writer’s block feels.”
He was paralyzed by the void. “The blank page is the problem,” he told me. “I cannot keep staring at it.”
I offered the only truth I had: “Close your eyes. Pretend you are blind.”
I told him to stir his memory, to notice the weight of the air, and to watch the scenes that flicker only when the world outside is dimmed. He told me it was impossible. We hung up in disagreement, but my frustration stemmed from a singular fact: I could not make him understand that writing is often most powerful when sight is not part of the process at all.
The Tyranny of the Eye
Eyes dominate our existence. We are told that 75 percent of our perception is visual. We seek truth in a look and romance in eye contact. This is why people feel pity for the blind; they assume we are locked out of the unspoken exchanges of life.
I once had sight, and I know its beauty. But I also know that eyes can lie. They fixate on the surface, the color of a coat, the height of a building, and mistake the skin of the world for its soul. In writing, eyes are often the most elegant distraction you have, pulling you toward clichés and surface-level descriptions.
Think of the “7 AM Trap.” You sit down to write, pen in hand. Suddenly, an autorickshaw screeches to a halt before your neighbour’s door. You look up. You wonder if the guest is his son-in-law. You notice the scuff on his American Tourister bag. Half an hour slips away. Your coffee is cold, and the page is still blank because you were too busy watching the world.
Not even the most beautiful vista from the window at my tableside would ever distract me from the computer and the keyboard. In fact, throughout the entire process, I listen to the screen reader read aloud the sentences, letting me know if they carry the pulse of a heartbeat.
Yes, no sight would sometime mean no distraction. No sight also tune me to the spoken word and how beautifully a scene could be paced.
The Inner Theatre
When the physical eyes are shut, the “Mind’s Eye” takes over. Without the optical clutter of your room, your brain begins to project scenes of startling clarity. In the darkness, I can see the exact way a shadow stretches across a fictional floorboard or the precise tremor in a character’s hand. This internal vision is delicate; external sight is an interruption, a bright light turned on in a movie theater.
To capture these scenes before they dissolve, I surrender to the rhythm of sound. I use a screen reader, a synthetic, unhurried voice that reads my words back to me. It strips away the ego of how a paragraph looks on the page and reveals only how it feels.
Such tools as the screen reader are no longer in the exclusive domain of ‘assistive technology’ that help the blind, those with low vision and the print disabled. Whether you use the “Read Aloud” feature in Word or ask an AI to narrate your draft, listening treats your work like an audiobook. You will hear the clunky sentence long before you see it. You will notice the rhythm of a heartbeat in your prose, or the lack of same.
Capturing the Scene at the Speed of Thought
Often, the latency of fingers on a keyboard is its own form of blindness. By the time you find the “right” word, the ghost of the image has vanished.
This is where dictation becomes a bridge between the soul and the page. Using tools like SuperWhisper or the dictate function on a phone, I often walk through my room and speak my thoughts into existence. I allow the words to land in their rawest, most honest form. I do not worry about “writing” sentences; I worry about “witnessing” the scene and reporting what I hear and feel. I can polish the bones later, but first, I must catch the spirit.
The Resonance Exercise: Finding Your Inner Vision
You do not need to lose your sight to gain this clarity. You only need to change your discipline. If the page feels like a wall, try this:
- The Blackout: Close your eyes. Take five deep breaths. Let the visual ghosts of your room, the lamp, the laptop, the dust, fade until there is only the dark.
- Locate the Feeling: Reach for a singular emotion dominating you right now, perhaps the anxiety of a deadline or a lingering regret.
- Build the Theater: Do not think about the feeling; build a room for it. If your regret were a place, what would it smell like? Is the air damp? Is there a distant sound of a door closing? Build the scene until it feels more real than the chair you are sitting in.
- Dictate the Soul: Use a speak app or your phone’s recorder. Describe the scene as it unfolds. Do not edit. Focus on the urgency of the moment.
- Embellish the Bones: Open your eyes. Look at the raw text you’ve captured. Now, use your sight to refine it, add the sharp dialogue, the precise adjective, the punctuation.
- The Resonance Test: Finally, let your computer read it back to you. Close your eyes one last time and listen as an audience member. If you find yourself leaning in, you have found the truth.
The Invitation
The next time you feel that familiar, miserable paralysis, the “commode” of the mind, stop straining. Stop staring at the white glare of the screen.
By using the tools of sound and the power of the Mind’s Eye, you stop writing for the eyes and start writing for resonance. You may find that the best way to truly see your story is to stop looking at it entirely.