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It's not school time and you aren't at work and yet, with a far off glaze in your eyes, you've blocked off the world to everything, but the bursting need to just...write. Flicking a pencil or pen as you bite your bottom lip in an attempt to coax the words to emerge from the carefully painted picture in your mind. Some days it works. They pour from your mind onto whatever you've chosen or whatever is closest.
The blinking cursor.
Mechanical pencil.
Number two.
Ball point.
Then nothing else matters. It's just you and your dreams. Coming to life on the page so fantastically in that moment that it's all you can do to get them out fast enough.
I know you're out there. You're not alone.
Myself As A Writer
My small fingers had a hard time gripping the pen left on the small table where the phone sat. Small pieces of paper lay there innocently. Perfectly blank. With a smile I grabbed those, too, and curled up in the darkness underneath to create another of my masterpieces. The ink of the pen stained the paper in letters only I could recognize in my three-year-old mind. Lines of squiggles and arches that swept across in their own lazy pattern. Okay, so maybe no one else could read it, but they didn't have to. I was proud to read it out loud, standing up straight, with the clearest and loudest voice I could manage.
My collection of "stories" grew and I kept them all. I was eager for people to ask me about them so I could run and go searching through my hoard of paper to find the exact scribbles that went with each one.
Nowadays, I laugh at that story. It's one of my mother's favorite ones to tell when she's going into horrific details of my embarrassing Terrible Two's past. She loves to say, "Oh, she's been writing since before she could write," and lately, I've begun to adopt the expression. I definitely beats the helpless shrug when I try to explain that...writing is me.
When I'm Out of Ideas...
I'm not going to lie. It sucks.
When my mind is blank it's almost as if my purpose in life has burnt out. I'm wandering around like a helpless idiot, searching for a way to make life make sense. I stumble around, lost in my daydreams and ignoring the weird looks my friends give me when I nod and smile in the wrong place (I know you've all done it!). The stupid blinking cursor on that clean white paper makes me want to rip my hair out and scream, but I don't. Inside, my mind is going a gazillion miles an hour trying to understand why this has to happen now, of all times, when, in reality, no time is "okay" with me.
What do I do?
I read.
I take the time off to distract my mind into creating vivid images from authors that have the amazing ability to suck my mind in and keep the ever present buzz of thought from driving me crazy. And to learn.
As a writer, I think, I have my own voice, but that doesn't mean I can't see how other people became successful using their own. I've gotten much of my inspiration from other people. I read something and all of a sudden, the link that's been missing, the piece I've been struggling to write, becomes clear.
Reading isn't the only thing I do, sometimes I just go along with my hectic life until something strikes me and sometimes it's not that I don't have a muse, it's that I don't know how to say what I'm thinking. So I wait and sooner or later, it all comes out.
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