Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing. The ideas bounce around, bumbling, rolling, hitting the walls inside my brain begging to be spilled out into the fathomless unknown of the world around me, wanting to be birthed and read and loved. And I look at them and think, ‘Yes. It’s time. You should come out now.’
But then I sit to write down these words and nothing happens. I stare at a blank screen, my fingers itching to add something, to mark it up with shapes and words and colors. To turn the blank canvas into something beautiful.
But what if it’s not?
What if the end creation is ugly? What if the end creation is molded from the wrong type of clay? Perhaps it would be best if that creation were to be swept away into the vast ocean, the same way every sandcastle – no matter how beauteous or misshapen it is – is washed out into the ocean, never to be recreated quite the same way.
I read the works of other authors with envy. Not for the richness of the storytelling or the way they capture moments in time, but for the sheer ability to write down these stories. To stick with those stories until they are told in completion. I wish I could escape the minutiae for a moment when I write so I could get beyond and into the entirety of the story.
Every time I sit down, I think, ‘This is the time. This time I will get it all out.’ And yet, this has never happened. But they say never say never, so here I am, hoping that – when I’m done writing this post – this will be that time.
This time, I will get the story down.