This site — like paper or, more often these days, like the doc­u­ment one is presen­ted when boot­ing up a stand­ard word pro­cessing pack­age — is white. Very white. I some­times won­der if that’s my first mis­take in the act of writ­ing. The sheer, unadul­ter­ated white­ness I place before myself.

It should be beau­ti­ful, clean, pristine. It should demand filling with black­ness, whether via inky trails or the lines and curves of eleg­ant typefaces. But a new fall of heavy snow is always spoilt by human inter­ven­tion — whether from the sludgy tyre tracks of Chelsea tract­ors or the yel­low­ing piss-trails of the post-pubbed and post-kebabed — and it some­how seems a shame to sully such a vast white expanse of paper or screen with one’s sim­il­arly ill-advised attempts at creativity.

So I don’t. Some­times for weeks on end. Yet all the time I have the nag­ging sen­sa­tion that I want to write. That I should be writ­ing. Because secretly — when no one is in danger of over­hear­ing me and smirk­ing at my pre­ten­sion — I like to call myself a writer.

Oh, and I miss writ­ing too, of course, when I’m not escap­ing into words and phrases. It’s always worth remem­ber­ing that sali­ent fact.

And that, in a semi-poetic nut­shell, is part of what Writers’ Bloc is all about. Though far from all of it, since to pon­ti­fic­ate at length about being unable to write would be even more ridicu­lous than this already highly self-referential concept of writ­ing about writ­ing. Undoubtedly, how­ever, I can’t help fore­see­ing that there will be much writ­ten here about being stuck, want­ing to be unstuck, and all the things that stop us from trudging our dirty foot­prints back and forth across the snow-covered fields. In the back of my mind, you see, there’s some crazy idea that to act­ively write about that cre­at­ive impasse might make it dis­ap­pear. Stranger things have happened.

Not only me, though. I would quickly tire of being the sole voice pon­ti­fic­at­ing on all the vari­ous threads sur­round­ing this topic, and would prob­ably end up curl­ing up in a corner and gnaw­ing at my own limbs until they bled. Writers’ Bloc depends on your con­tri­bu­tions, your thoughts, your ima­gin­ings, your cre­ativ­ity. You can write briefly or at length, pur­su­ing any tan­gent that’s even vaguely con­nec­ted with writ­ing. Just write, that’s the key.

Hav­ing said that, I shall imme­di­ately con­tra­dict myself by men­tion­ing that pho­to­graphs, pic­tures and even video clips on the writ­ing theme are very wel­come, if you wish to sub­mit them. I’ve found, espe­cially in recent months when words haven’t flowed as freely or as often as I would like, that visual imagery is often a wel­come refuge, as well as provid­ing inspir­a­tion to return to frantic typing.

As to the prac­tical nuts and bolts of sub­mis­sions, please read the site’s guidelines before click­ing Send on your email. Although they look lengthy, that’s more to do with my typ­ical verb­os­ity and less with actual rules and reg­u­la­tions, of which there are refresh­ingly few.

I look for­ward to read­ing your con­tri­bu­tions. Right now, though, I appear to have spent half the day writ­ing here, and I really should tidy the hovel I call my humble home.

Vaughan Simons calls him­self the Editor of Writers’ Bloc because he has always longed for such a gran­di­ose job title. He writes online under the increas­ingly point­less pseud­onym of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness, is a con­trib­utor to PIFFLE, and throws his other words and web detritus on Unre­li­ably Wit­nessed. He’s also appeared in The Cor­duroy Mtn.