THE AL GILKES COLUMN – Writing in the block

People ask me all the time a lot of questions about the writing of this column.The one that pops up most often has to do with how am I able to come up with a totally different idea every week since I don’t write on a specific topic like other columnists who deal with things like politics, tourism, computing and so on.The answer to that question is that more often than not I sit at the computer without a clue about what I am going to write about. While waiting for a light to turn in my head, I clear my thoughts by typing over and over and over again the first sentence I was given to type back when typing was done on paper on typewriters – “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party”. I sometimes extend that by adding – “because it’s been a long time since the party has come to the aid of any men, good or bad”. That “now is the time” phrase was apparently created as a typing drill by a teacher named Charles E. Weller and I have been informed that many typing books now use “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” instead because it exactly fills out a 70-space line if you put a full stop at the end. After typing that several times and an idea still doesn’t explode in my mind, I sometimes turn to another phrase that I was given for typing practice – “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. This one is known as an English-language pangram which, translated, means a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters from way back in the 1800s and now serves the same purpose for computer keyboards.If my mind still remains blank, as often is the case after a hard day’s night or work at the office, I resort to various means in an effort to trigger an idea. Sometimes I collect all the newspapers for the past week and go through the various stories, especially the local ones, to see if there is something that happened around which I can craft a column.If and when that does not work, I go into cyberspace. I click on the Windows Internet Explorer button and off I go into the world of Google and Yahoo, of Twitter and Facebook, of YouTube and Bajan Dancehall and the million and one other possible places to search for an idea.But, believe it or not, there are times when not even the Internet with its mass of information is able to trigger an idea around which I can weave my magic to produce the kind of column that fits into my mould. That’s about that time that frustration starts setting in and the voice in my head starts to urge me to call Sunday Sun Editor Carol Martindale and tell her to “go without me”.However, before I consider that stage I often delve into what’s left of my memory bank to see if there’s something of interest that I might not have used over almost 30 years of writing this particular column Sunday after Sunday.I must admit that after all of those efforts, there are still times when nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, comes to mind to write about. The result is that I am left with what is commonly known in this profession as writer’s block. This was one of those times and I apologise sincerely for having not written a single word today.• Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.