On Writing

I have discovered, with some horror, over the last few weeks, that I have forgotten how to write. No, this is not one of those moments when I blow things all out of proportion and go on a whining spree. I have lost the patience to write. There have been several scenes that have gripped me, and I have begun to write about them, but too soon, easily, I have grown distracted–by facebook, by my cellphone, by a friend pounding repeatedly on the door. My attention span is like a short, flimsy thread in the wind…and right now, sitting in my apartment on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I am beginning to realize the utter horror of it. To write is to draft and re-draft repeatedly. To sit at your desk with the fraction of an idea in your mind, and fight valiantly to bring it to life.  I appear to have grown weary of fighting.
This is the last “real” piece I started to write–the date, quite horrifyingly, is November 12, 2010:
It was a big house. Fancy: the sinks in the bathrooms were made of glass. The staircase was wood and glass. A chandelier hung in the kitchen. The French doors downstairs opened out onto a patio.  The first few days I was there visiting, I was constantly afraid I would slip on the highly polished marble floors and crash through an invisible glass door. My aunt laughed when I told her. “You’ll get used to it,” she said. I was skeptical.
She was a happily married forty-something year old, my aunt. She worked part-time at Macy’s—just to have something to do, she said—and she attended church regular as clockwork, every Wednesday and Sunday. Her husband was a diplomat; a very precise man. He wore his suits perfectly pressed, and his shoes fantastically shined. His jeans, when he deigned to wear them, mind; always had a crease in them. They had three children together: one girl, 21, and two boys—14, and 18. I visited with the family whenever I had off from school.
There was a formula to the way they lived. My aunt and her husband got up at 6:30 every morning. I could hear them, in the room just above mine, pattering around, getting ready for work. The radio would go on, and maybe they talked about the news; I couldn’t tell, I could just make out his baritone and her soprano. The taps would run, on and off. At 7:30, they would make breakfast: always bacon and eggs, always coffee; the smells would waft through the entire house. At 8:00, they would be gone.
What is particularly terrifying is that I know where I want this story to go. I have the outline etched out clearly in my mind. It could be quite the fantastic story. But I can’t seem to get past that last line.
About an hour ago, I finished reading Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” and began to write about it. The flavor of the story was still fresh in my mind, I was still enthralled, still wanted to tell somebody about it. But I only managed to construct three or four awkward sentences, none of them coming even slightly close to what I wanted to say, and now I suspect I am going to abandon that post as I have abandoned so many posts over the last few months.
What is this terrible malady? What is this illness that has turned writing into work? Which has turned a single glimpse of a little bubbly child wearing his father’s over-sized jacket and tripping over its unending sleeves–into something…mundane?
How do I fix it?