To Hit Enter

Here’s where I am where writing is concerned. I can be walking down the street or staring out the window at the Theatre, and inspiration will strike. I’ll know what I want to write and will even have the first two or three sentences composed in my mind. I’ll be so excited and want to start writing right away and then when I get home, I’ll be totally unmotivated. No, it’s more than just unmotivated, it actually feels like I don’t know how to write. I feel like an imposter.

I always imagined writer’s block to be a lack of inspiration. Like surrounding myself with crumpled up sheets of paper, lamenting that “I don’t know what to write!” But it’s more like the words flee before me. I can’t capture them, I can’t tame them, they just flit away like butterflies. Or when I do get them down, they seem either too mundane or overly ostentatious (that's a lot of ostentatious, you see). You ever get like that? What do you do?

I mean, and I’ve been in enough English classes to know that I should just write no matter what because writing is thinking and so you can't write "I don't know what to write" for too long before something pops into your head. Other than social media posts, I’m a little out of practice. And yet I was browsing through the bookstore yesterday, flipping through books of collected personal essays, and thought more than once, "I could be writing these!"

Disjointed thoughts. They connect somehow.

So here’s my writing. It isn’t long, it isn’t clever, but it’s finger to keyboard to hit enter. Can't get it done if you don't start, right? Cuz I really can't see myself writing "I don't know what to write" two thousand times for thirty days, it just isn't going to happen (and that wouldn't really be a novel, would it? I mean, what a predictable ending).

I was supposed to do all this writing over the summer, and that didn't happen. I began a short story, but never finished it. I might yet still. The exciting thing about that is that after all this time, when I pick it up again, the story might take unexpected turns, which is weird, scary, and exciting. This very blog is turning out to be more freewrite. I can take it. I can dig it. As long as I hit enter at the end.