Writer's Blog.

I don't know about others who write blogs on a fairly regular basis, but for me, coming up with something to write about every week has become something of a task, if not a chore. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing my blog and at times it has even been a cathartic tool, allowing me to vent feelings that I would have previously perhaps just bottled up. It's just that, of late, as I scour my increasingly frustrated brain, I seem to be finding it more difficult to find topics to write about.
This is, in part, no doubt due to the fact that I feel I have virtually exhausted the subject which this blog is about- mental ill health and the stigma which surrounds it. Frankly, as most of the activities I undertake are to do with this subject too, I am beginning to get a little bored banging on about stigma and its pernicious effects. It could be also that many readers, after a while, begin to suffer some sort of compassion fatigue, and are, perhaps, fed up with the many appeals to their conscience which are out there- starving people in Africa, the plight of mistreated animals, sufferers of cancer. After a certain time, perhaps we all become a little inured to such appeals, desensitized simply by their apparent ubiquity, and mental health becomes just another "issue".
So, as I have nothing else to write about, perhaps I should write about the seeming inability to write, or what is also known as the peculiar phenomenon of writer's block. In this instance, though, maybe I should call it "writer's blog".
Indeed, it seems that many writers have taken to writing about not being able to write. Stephen King, for example, in both his novella, "Secret Window, Secret Garden", and the novel, "The Shining", created characters who were themselves writers and were suffering from some form of creative block. In Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of "The Shining" I'm sure we can all remember the scene where Shelley Duvall, despite reassurances from her husband Jack Torrance that his new fictional work is going well, finds, in his absence, innumerable pages filled with only one phrase repeated over and over again- "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Eventually Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in the film, has a complete mental breakdown and tries to kill his wife and son. In George Orwell's novel, "Keep the Aspidistra Flying", the main character Gordon Comstock struggles to complete an epic poem. In George Gissing's "New Grub Street", writer's block is the main theme, with the character of novelist Edwin Reardon becoming completely unable to write. In Micheal Chabon's "Wonder Boys", college English professor Grady Tripp, despite claiming that he does not believe in writer's block, has been unable to finish a promised third novel after seven years. And finally, in the film "Adaptation", in a marvellous piece of postmodern self-reflexiveness, Nicolas Cage plays the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in a film which is itself written by Charlie Kaufman, as he struggles, without much success, to complete a screen adaptation of Susan Orlean's book, "The Orchid Thief".
So, if you're stuck for something to write about, why not, as all the above have done, write about not being able to write. And as I struggle with the tyranny of the blank page, I'm beginning to ponder just exactly what my next post will  be about. I know that it's going to be witty, insightful, intelligent, entertaining and accessible, but not to the extent that it insults the reader's own intelligence. It's going to be all those things. My God, it's going to be a masterpiece of blogging. I just have to find a subject. Now, what could that be....?