I told Red I would be home by sunset, and here I am, an hour from home, a half-hour before sunset, with Saturday morning’s blog post still not written, and no clear idea about what to write.
I leaf through my journal looking for something decent I haven’t used for a blog post yet, and my eyes fall upon this, which I wrote one day when I was stuck in much the same way:
WRITE THE NEXT WORD.
It’s a forest-and-the-trees thing. A person (that would be me) gets so caught up in worrying about What I Shall Write that the obvious escapes attention: It’s all done one word at a time. If I am uncertain about the Great Theme, go back to the beginning and write one word, then put another one behind it, and a third, and keep writing.
I return from time to time to a theme: Write anything until you write something. Call it word association, or call it nothing at all, just write anything. Once your Something begins to emerge, you can discard anything you wrote that is Not-Something.
And there is my blog post for today. Nothing Earth-shattering, but it’s something. What was I worried about?
(Oh, yeah, I was worried that here I am, an hour from home, 20 minutes before sunset, and I told Red I would be home by sunset. Hand me that phone, will ya?)