This post is in memory of Boyd Atkins, who wrote the song "Heebie Jeebies" and Louis Armstrong, who recorded it, one hundred years ago.
Writers get the heebie-jeebies easily. They break their routine for one day and wonder whether they'll get that groove back. They get up from their composing chair mid-sentence and stress over finding their rhythm again. To them, there's no such thing as superstition. This stiff, I mean stuff, is real. And as scary as the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to Ebeneezer Scrooge. But writers' ghosts are the Poltergeist of Perfectionism, the Demon of Distraction, th Phantom of Procrastination, and the Wraith of Writer's Block.
What better time to ponder writers' heebie-jeebies than on Halloween? Henry Roth's masterpiece 1934 novel Call It Sleep was followed by a six-decade period of no literary output. Ralph Ellison spent 42 years working on his second novel without completing it after his first Invisible Man, became a sensation in 1952. No one know when the heebie-jeebies come, and the reasons they come are many.
What is the antidote for the heebie-jeebies? I have written extensively about using the writing process efficiently in this blog over the past 22 years. You can write "writer's block" in the search bar and get heaps of tips. But not today. For the day of the heebie-jeebies, I leave you with the specter of a blank page.
Happy Halloween.
