On Yesterday’s Break from Routine
It came as a surprise to me too. I just found myself sitting in front of a blank document and blinking cursor, and I didn’t have anything to say. Writing these entries usually goes one of two ways. The first is that I have something to talk about when I sit down to write. The other is when I don’t (obviously). So far I’ve only written these in the latter portion of the day, which I could claim boils down to having experienced something specific that day to write about, but it’s pure procrastination. The times when I have nothing immediate in my head to discuss are challenging, but up until now, I’ve been able to just start writing about any inane topic and then, from that, string out a longer piece. It only occurred to me now the resemblance that bears to the reaction I noticed in myself yesterday.
To begin with, I knew I had absolutely nothing to write about. My mind was as empty as I often wish it would be when it doesn’t shut up. Again, I had nothing to say. So, I opened a page I had been putting off for a while: r/WritingPrompts on Reddit. It is one of the few genuinely good things to come out of a website that otherwise houses the fringe lunatics of the internet. In this small oasis can be found a seemingly infinite well of ideas. I’d say the ratio is about 5:1, comparing mediocre to good, and it is those latter few that I save as images whenever I see them. I’d kept the page open on my browser for a few days, hoping that having it in the background would inspire me to find an idea I liked and run with it in short-story form. So when I knew my non-fiction bank was well and truly empty, I did just that.
The idea I found bears little, if any, resemblance at all to what I ended up writing. What I found happened was an extension of that fleeting ability to write about anything. Ideas came and would not stop coming. I might regret not noting any of them down, but I have such faith in myself to manifest ideas of equal quality whenever I next need to. I am extremely curious as to what inside me powers this ‘temperamental notion machine’. It seems much easier to bear the inability to finish a sentence (or write another one), if I knew there was another mode inside me that, once accessed, could propel me forward. I cannot, of course, speak to the quality of anything I actually create as a result, unfortunately. I have very little faith in how well what I wrote yesterday will come off tomorrow, much less months or years down the line. But I know there is hope to be had.
In that vein, I was reading two old pieces of work recently, one I had written a few weeks ago, and the other two years ago. I was instantly critical, as one can expect themselves to be. But I take pride in the fact that were sentences, large portions, even, that I still think were well-written, an opinion I perhaps didn’t even share at the time of their writing. So, I know judging right now isn’t going to get me very far, but the sheer act of writing will. Anything can be fixed or improved, but it needs to exist in the first place.