“The more a subject matters to you, the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it.  The bar is higher,” Malcolm Gladwell observes at the beginning of his book The Bomber Mafia.*

For Gladwell, the high bar story he had in mind centered around bombing campaigns during WWII, a subject which had fascinated him since childhood.  His words instantly resonated with me, pointing like the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come toward the tombstone where all my unwritten ideas for stories, poems, and papers will lie buried and cold at my current rate.  Like Scrooge himself, I knew where the finger pointed and that I had built the grave and tomb myself, guarding my ideas from outside access like the angel with the flaming sword outside Eden—or perhaps more aptly, gathering up all the reasons to wait or hesitate or reconsider or rewrite, chaining them to my high bar story, and then throwing it overboard, anchor and all.

Is this a form of writer’s block?  I think so.  More like writer’s anchor or writer’s tombstone than writer’s block, but a member of the writer’s block family at least.

Do you find yourself burdening an idea with great expectations until it breaks?  Instead of not knowing what to say, you have too much to say and don’t know what to leave out.  The longer you wait, the more the idea builds, but instead of reaching critical mass and exploding into something earth-shatteringly brilliant, the idea goes beyond critical mass, transforms into a mass of self-criticism, and finally fizzles into a sad lump of cold gray coal.

As with most great deeds, a time comes when you must stop thinking and do: stop gathering and write.  So seize your sword-pen and enter the fray, one fight, one writing, at a time.  Burn the bad ideas and move on to the better unfettered; don’t stop until you’ve started.

…And there, that’s one idea written and checked off my list.  Thanks for tuning in.  Now for the next seventy.

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*Apologies for the missing full citation.  I listened to the book, so I don’t know the exact page number.