I often tell my students that in order to write they don’t have to have “something to say.” Instead of trying to figure out what to write, they should just write, and let the act of writing help them discover their own thoughts. Writing is magical in this way. Even if we don’t have “something to write about,” when we put pen to paper and start writing, even if it’s just “blah, blah, blah, I don’t know what to write,” if we keep going, if we keep moving the pen, then eventually, our thoughts start to form, they go from being invisible to visible, from formless blobs into recognizable shapes.
This happened to me recently during a training session for 826Michigan. We had to write about a moment when we learned something, and I honestly couldn’t think of any such moment. I’m sure I’ve had many, but as I sat there in the midst of the training session, my mind was a total blank. I wracked my brain for something, anything to write about, but nothing was coming, and the timer on the computer screen was ticking. So instead of waiting for that “something” to appear fully-formed in my head, I just started writing. I wrote about how I couldn’t think of anything, of how I was sure I’d learned many, many things in my life, but no particular moment stood out, and on and on I wrote, very stream-of-consciousness. And then — as I’ve told my students so often before — suddenly an idea came into my head, as I was writing. The writing pulled the memory out of my head: a memory I NEVER would’ve thought of, even if I had sat and thought for hours.
But here’s the kicker: Even though I tell my students about this phenomenon, about how writing IS thinking, and that we don’t have to wait until we have something to say, that we can just start writing and let ourselves think on the page, even though I preach this over and over, I STILL end up forgetting it when it comes to my own writing, to my own craft. Physician, heal thyself!
For a long time now, I’ve wanted to start blogging everyday, but as you might see if you scroll down through this page, I have not been particularly successful at reaching this goal. There are spurts here and there, where I manage to write for a few days in a row, or nearly. But then there are huge gaps. Weeks. Months. I backslide continually. And then I always resolve to get back on the horse and try again. Which is good, in a way. But despite my best intentions and resolve, the thing that trips me up is that I don’t know what to write about. I come up with schemes (“write a poem everyday for thirty days!”), but they never work. I’m afraid to write those thirty poems because most days, I don’t know what to write about. I don’t have anything to say. So I don’t put my fingers on the keyboard because I don’t have any ideas. It’s the same problem as the one I had in that training session: I can’t think of anything. My mind is blank.
But what I’ve missed is the simple, true fact that writing IS thinking. I don’t need to have anything to write about. I can just write. I can write and let ideas come as they may, and in that act of writing, I will discover what I have to say. Just as I’m doing right now. When I sat down at my computer this evening, I had no idea what I would blog about, I only knew that I needed to blog. If I was going to make “blog everyday” a thing, then I needed to do it. Not think about it, not wait for an idea, not even try to come up with an idea. I simply needed to start writing.
Metaphors: Writing as rambling, wandering. Writing as discovery. Writing as a physical act, not just a mental one.
And here I am, blogging. Writing. I tell my students all the time, “To ‘essay’ means to find one’s way.”
(I stole this quote from Barb Rebbeck and my high school AP Lang teacher).
I need to remember my own advice.
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