Writing

I just finished reading Liz Prather’s book for writing teachers, The Confidence to Write: A Guide for Overcoming Fear and Developing Identity as a Writer. It’s such a great book for helping students with their writing, but it’s equally as good for helping teachers with their writing. Today’s post was born of one of the prompts from this book.

I sit down in the quiet and put my fingers on the keyboard, all the ideas building up behind my fingers. I have three active ideas on tabs open in front of me, and I can dabble a little in all three, but I really need to choose one to begin with today. I’m on the clock–30 minutes only right now–and I hear my son’s TV show in the other room and I know my daughter is playing video games in her room. Soon it’s lunch and I want to hang out with them and do chores in the afternoon. But right now, I have this brief window of quiet and focus, and I like all of my ideas. I’m interested and curious to see what other ideas I will dream and where these ideas will go.

I’m hesitant too, because none of these three ideas may be any good. I may be “wasting time”--although I know that no time spent writing is ever really wasted time. It’s true that my brain occasionally needs to be tricked into writing with some prompts or quick writes like this one, and that every now and then I’m forcing myself to write sentences that I hate even as I’m writing them. My ideal reader often exists in a cloud, and the only thing I’m sure of is that she’s laughing at the fact that I am trying to write. All this produces hesitancy.

Yet here I sit, day after day–-sometimes on the couch, or on my bed, or in the book room, or in a coffee shop, or at the kitchen table. I’m putting down words, and I always feel good for having done it. Sometimes the ideas excite and delight me. Sometimes they evade me. But I keep chasing them, because I am totally in love with writing, and have not let it go since the moment as a child I realized that this is something people do. Writing is what I do.