Tips for Writers: Just Show Up!
Your Daily Leap of Faith
Underpinning the encouragement in a previous Tips for Writers, is the fact that a leap of faith is involved in believing you’ll have any idea what to write once you begin. This isn’t about choosing a topic—there are lots of writing prompts available for that. But once you have a topic, what are you going to say about it? Sometimes your leap will be a mere hop over a crack. Other times it’ll be a daredevil Evil Knevel dive across the Grand Canyon. I call it a leap of faith because it means trust.
But trust in whom?
Youm.
If You Desire to Write…
…that desire comes from somewhere. And that same somewhere holds the key to what to write. Sometimes you’ll have notes and ideas up the ying-yang (oh, your poor aching ying-yang). Other days you’ll have nada, zilch, squatarooney.
I’m pretty sure I just made that last word up. But wait–that’s my point! I made it up on-the-spot. As in, I had no idea I would come up with it until I came up with it. As in, when I started writing the sentence I suddenly decided to be silly (a congenital affliction of mine) and write multiple synonyms: nada, zilch, squat. And then it occurred to me to make it even sillier by adding “-arooney.”
Yeah, I know, it’s not really all that clever. But it does illustrate my point: I didn’t come up with it until I showed up.
So Take the Leap
The worst that can happen is you’ll plunge to your metaphorical death, and plunging to your metaphorical death isn’t really all that bad. Trust me, I’ve done it many times. In fact, when I do, I always seem to come up with a way to survive. But only once I’m there.
So just show up!
