Author: Angela Rydell

My roof is going through a transformation this week: from ice to water. And as icicles shatter on the front stoop, drips patter the porch, and drabs splatter the dining room floors (sigh), I’m cheering on the transformation. Yes, despite dining room dangers, I’m delighting in the thaw.

I’m also listening to a podcast that prompts meditators to visualize a tight place in the body and imagine it shift from ice to water, and water to vapor. My body gets it. I close my eyes, identify that frozen place in my shoulder, and via visualization, slowly unfreeze it, at least a little, sometimes a lot, every time. This metaphor has helped me through the pandemic—and it can help writers through a block, too.

My meditation coach prompts us to notice and become alert to the conditions around the block. Then gently label what we experience—whether tingling, shooting pains, aching or the like. You can do the same for your writing if you get stuck. Identify where the writing isn’t flowing. Where does your pen stop or the editor’s red pen stop you? Then zero in.

Name the experience. Exactly where does the block start. Look closer. The issue may be subtle like an ache—dialogue that drags. A title that doesn’t quite fit. Or you may feel shooting pains and know the problem right away—that character whose goals never go anywhere. So observe and name. Maybe it’s a plot level problem, where a subplot detours, a hole in character development opens up, or inner tension fizzles? If at the level of the sentence, is it a cluster of adverbs, an imprecise verb, a sequence of abstractions? Keep observing the block. Name what you see. Then you’re better able to find the solution.

On our roof, we can reach some places with our roof rake, but not all the tricky corners and steep angles of our 1930s cape cod. Those problem places produce blue-ribbon-winning icicles I would have worshipped as a child. Thick, menacing, harpoon-quality icicles that unhinge themselves and sink into the banked-up snow whale of our yard. That’s where we need to be vigilant. And stay vigilant as the ice melts. Because now we can see gaps in the roof’s flashing where preventative maintenance could have helped. Right above the bucketful of drips in the dining room.

As the literal ice thaws outside, I know that concentrating on the ice dams themselves won’t transform the ice into water vapor before it seeps into the house. But thanks to the frozen places thawing, I not only know the problem and its fix but have a crystal-clear image in my mind of a literal frozen icicle thawing—ice to water—making my meditations even more productive, my shoulders more relaxed, and I’m ready to reach nirvana any day now, I’m sure of it

Throughout our lives, certain outsized moments seize us—the first red leaf of fall the year of a divorce. The widow seeing her reflection in the hearse’s black veneer before it drives away.

Those small things take on big significance and give life’s incomprehensible immensity a dazzling order, like the moment—crystalized in my memory after I bundled up my little brother, brought him outside to see his first snow—when he touched his tongue to the frozen air and let a snowflake rest there. I felt beyond my twelve years of age, bigger than a big sister.

You’ve been there too—bigger than yourself in small ways. And when we ponder those kinds of moments, there’s power in them, power to create good art—make a poem, a painting, an aria, a pattern of plies choreographed for the dance. There we lose ourselves in what we gain, too. Those gains outsize us.

Indulge that yearning to capture what’s seemingly fleeting, sublimely clear, and perfectly human while also bigger than any one of us. The experience that has seized you, you can seize in turn: Use it as a guide to your next creation.