Is anyone really surprised? Perhaps university has stuffed me up in this department (that is, the actual 'writing what you love' department). At uni they always tell you that "you must learn the rules so that you can break them" in that annoying, patronising tone, which only justifies my constant daydreaming and folding gum wrappers into origami ninja stars.

Now I'm not completely hapless in the writing department. I am sure that the majority of my troubles come from an alluring cocktail of bone laziness, shit (yet strangely compelling) 'Reality' television and the Internet (and I haven't even played a game of Hearts over at Yahoo! Games for months now). There's probably an element of self-doubt in there too, but since this is a web log, no one wants to read about 'emotions', 'struggles' or anything else about the human psyche (especially mine). They want to read about sex, drugs and the failure of their peers... because as we all know, there is nothing more self-serving than watching someone else fail (just read this month's Cosmopolitan for an educated perspective on this topic, which is foundational to the development and behaviour of the feminine mystique).

So yeah, I got drunk on the weekend.

A strange thing about my bouts of writer 'block' is that they usually end with moments of pseudo divine intervention. I have a scale for these moments, from their most momentous to the most obvious (which can be held parallel to someone called 'Shaneshqua', rising from her chair in the audience of the any American talk show, to make a witty quip along the lines of "Don't hate the playa baaabay...hate the gaaaaaame!").

An example of this would be an MSN convo that a friend of mine, Nerb (which is the sort of word that grates over your brain when you say it to yourself, in my honest opinion) and I had a couple of nights ago. Nerb, being quite the creative individual that he is, suggested a number of methods for writing screenplays without thinking of a plot first (unfortunately, he also swore me to secrecy). However, I kept debating these methods with my wanky 'film school' banter. To which he concluded:

NERB says: screw the plot

NERB says: specially if its really good dialogue

NERB says: or great scene setup

NERB says: if thats your aim, then thats your aim

NERB says: don't forget that

NERB says: it doesn't matter if the plot sucks, cause a film, no matter how long, is more then a plot

NERB says: helpful hints

An example of the former category occurred last year when I met John Birmingham at the Brisbane Writers Festival.

I was up the creek without a paddle during this time, as I supposed to submit something incredibly cliché, yet uniquely tasteful for submission at another university (which shall remain nameless as they are a bunch of smarmy knobs) and I had a keyboard phobia and an empty bottle of Guarana pills.

At the time, Mr Birmingham was busy with someone who looked like they also had consumed too much caffeine/alcohol/guarana 'herbal extracts' in their daily dietary intake. I think that were talking about political matters because I was vaguely interested until the Liberal party was mentioned.

When ol' man river was out of the picture, I turned to Birmingham and said, "Now let's have a chat about something uneducational".

Luckily I was about to steal a few moments of his time before the usual entourage of stoned, hairy 'Felafel' fans bombarded the scene. Not only did I score a scribble on my copy of 'Dopeland', but I also got to ask a question that was pretty cliché, but burning in my brain:

Me: So, what do you do when you have a writer's block?

Birmingham: Well, writer's block really is something that fiction writers get... it's a lapse in imagination really.

Enough said.