How to write when we have nothing to write.
A tiny heart, hand drawn, on white painted wall, black paint peeling back around it.
Rest your eyes! You can listen to this newsletter instead of reading it.
Begin here: I’ve got nothing.
I had big ideas about sending you a banger of a newsletter this January. I started the year with an unexpected swell of inspiration and drive. I even chunked it out into doable pieces:
Monday: Expand ideas, land on one.
Tuesday: Work out the idea — notes, voice memos, free writing.
Wednesday: Rough draft
… And so on.
But Monday, my dog was sick and my inbox was acting like an active volcano. Tuesday, I drank too much coffee and couldn’t sit still. By Wednesday, I was aching with the existential emptiness of the blank page. I would never write again.
I’d forgotten one of the most basic truths about writing: We mistake feeling ready for being ready.
I can’t count how many workshops have started with participants saying, “I didn’t know if I should come tonight, I’ve got nothing” … And then watching it wrap up a couple hours later with all of us beaming and amazed by what we created.
Truth is — we rarely feel like we have anything to write. If we pause and listen to that feeling, it can throw walls up around us in an instant. It can keep us trapped and small for decades.
The trick, then, is to show up empty handed. To let the walls emerge and fall and emerge again. To keep finding our way back.
Zadie Smith — There isn’t really any solution to self-doubt, you just have to write and doubt simultaneously.
Maya Angelou — Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.
It’s the same path if we’ve been blocked for 3 days or 13 years.
The first step, always, is finding a tiny glimmer of hope, even an infinitesimally faint one, that something might happen if we just try, and then to bear the tremendous discomfort of just trying until something actually starts to happen.
That something might feel small, but all we need is a few words to follow back to where our trust lives. Over time, we can learn that this path is reliable.
So here’s to doubt, yours and mine.
Here’s to the hope that’s right there beside it, when we keep looking.
Here’s to the chorus of bullshit in our heads that tells us there’s no point.
And here’s to writing anyway.
Okay, it wasn’t nothing.
This newsletter won’t change the course of anyone’s new year, but I’m remembering now that we don’t write because we have ideas, we write to find our ideas. It’s good to remember that.
Richard Wagamese — Sometimes you write just to feel your fingers moving.
I hope you’ll find a way to feel your fingers moving too this blustery month. Happy January, beautiful people.
In it with you,
