Only six days in and I’m running out of things to write about. I wasn’t expecting this writing project to be difficult, but I was expecting it to be a little easier. It’s been kind of neat to see how I find a few minutes at different times of the day to plug in a few words, before I get caught up doing something else.
I recently finished reading The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, & Earn Your Audience, by Chuck Wendig. It’s full of aphorisms about what you should do if you want to write and get published, much like the title suggests. Somewhere in the pages, I read into it the inspiration to try this writing project.
It’s probably not the writing itself that is difficult. It’s the ideas that must ferment in my brain and permeate through my fingertips that are difficult to control. It’s waiting for that quiet moment when my thoughts have a second to align that’s hard to work into the day.
Quiet surroundings are not the key, but quiet thoughts are.
Once, in Saturday school (religious classes for Ismailis), the class was being rowdy. The teacher, a lovely, but strict, older woman, told us that empty vessels make the most noise. I mean, they do, but I think she was really saying that you can’t think while being loud and rambunctious.
When it comes to percolating ideas, I think the same holds true. Your mind must be quiet. Sometimes this happens in the loudest of places, like when you lose yourself to the drowning sounds bellowing from eight-foot tall speakers. Or, it can happen during a walk through the cemetery at dusk.
Writing, I think, is more an act of thought than it is of words. We admire great writers not because of how they’ve written – which words they’ve used and how they’ve punctuated their sentences – but because of how they think and make us think. Thinking, as an action, is strenuous work. It’s the mountain that Sisyphus was forced to climb.
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