Not writing nothing is a win

I don’t much feel like writing today, but here I go.

It’s like they say about love — it’s a commitment, it’s a decision, and maybe you made that commitment in the heat of passion and glorious emotion, but sometimes you love just because you said that’s who you are. And so sometimes you write because you said you would write, and if words aren’t written then you prove yourself a liar, or a slacker, or both.

And so here are some words to fulfill the commitment, even though I feel as creative as a rock on a dark and stormy night by a castle that looks like it was carved out of a “Cliches for Dummies” coloring book.

The cellphone just interrupted this dreary train of thought, chirping from across the room, out of my reach. Was it an important call, or was my car warranty about to expire again? I suppose I’d better check; it’s not as if I was feeling inspired anyway.

Still, for the first time in a few days, I sat down to write for no other reason than “writers write,” and so I fulfilled the first rule of writing, and that is progress. And I wrote even though I didn’t feel like writing, which is also progress. And I kept writing even though all I wrote is that I don’t feel like writing, and I didn’t even write that very well. All I did was put a bunch of blather down on the page, but blather is better than nothing, which is what I wrote yesterday and the day before, and so I made progress today.

It’s sad when scribbling garbage on a page is an improvement. But if I grew from nothing to blather in a single day, think what I might accomplish if I kept doing this every day. Well, yes, it could be that I just fritter and blather away for days and weeks and years, but more likely I eventually will write something worth sharing. After all, before you write something sublime, first you have to write something, period, and see where it goes from there.

And so — I made progress today. I didn’t write nothing.

And now I should see who called.