I haven’t got around to blogging for a while, and I miss doing it. Once my Christmas break came to an end, so did much of my free time to do things I enjoy, like designing furniture out of old pallets, reading novels just for fun, and writing. So I decided tonight to sit down for twenty minutes and just write anything that came out and post it no matter what. Including this paragraph. You have 20 minutes - - - - GO!
There’s really something to be said for the whole process of getting thoughts down in writing, and then having the honor to share those thoughts with anyone interested. And this is so much easier to do now than at any other point in recorded history. It’s amazing really. Imagine what Socrates would have done with the audience each of us has waiting for us once we hit the “submit” button. Then again, he may have been watching videos and gotten distracted. Like many bloggers, on any given day I end up with views from all around the globe, and it still amazes me that anyone really reads this stuff. But back to the process of writing . . .
16 minutes.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” And honestly, he’s exactly right. Writing is about passion and determination and allowing obscure thoughts to crawl out from those crevices we hide them in during the day in order to make space for deadlines and schedules and newspaper stories and appointments and other matters. When writers try to find those thoughts, and can’t find them, we call it writer’s block. Sometimes writer’s block can stem from the mere circumstance of not having enough time to coax those thoughts out from the hiding places they get shoved into for safe keeping. And so we don’t write.
And our thoughts wither. And our hearts wither.
10 minutes.
As true to Hemingway’s suggestion, the greatest salve to writer’s block is just to sit down at a keyboard and just start typing something. Anything. It doesn’t even matter what. Even this mess. Just spew out some random nonsense about your grocery list, some Sting song lyrics if you know any like De doo doo doo De da da da just because that is what is in my head right now for some reason, a plot line you remember from McHale’s Navy and how it somehow still reminds me of my grandfather, a childhood remembrance about putting penny candy at the bottom of a slurpee on Saturday mornings, or maybe just how it is a gorgeous night, but somehow you wish it was raining instead because rain is exciting to watch and reminds you of coffee. It reminds me of my wife too and how we both like the rain and how excited we were that it rained right after our wedding even though other people might think that’s weird. It doesn’t even matter what we write. Just that we write.
Because our best words are most often those which we did not expect to write. Our best words are merely amorphous thoughts given a form and a structure and a cadence to be understood by others so they too can see, hear, feel and experience what you see, hear and feel and experience. And a camaraderie is established.
3 minutes.
Every now and then I get into the rhythm of writing, and my fingers just kind of start moving along on their own across the keyboard until the fine moment when a thought goes straight from a seldom-accessed synapse and bypasses all thought, feelings and premonition and somehow ends up on the screen in front of me. And when it happens you know it. Like the paragraph right before this one.
My kids are asking what’s for dinner, and I don’t know what to tell them without checking the menu posted on the refrigerator.
Times up.
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