When You Don’t Know What to Write

We’ve all done it before, sat in front of a blank screen or empty sheet of paper and wondered what to write when we have no idea what to write. Your fingers hover just above the keys ready to type down that idea the moment it comes, your pencil, sharpened to a deadly point, twirls idly in your hand waiting for that inspiration and…... nothing.

So, we take a deep breath, and start running through all those little files in our brain. There has to be something in all those millions upon millions of thoughts that traverse our brains each day. That’s what we think until after five to ten minutes of fruitless searching we go back to staring at our ineffective endeavor. If you are anything like me, by now I’ve run my fingers over the keys in a ridiculously fast rate, pretendingI’vegotastorythat’sgoodenoughforthefrontpageofthebestnewspaperinthecountry! Instead, what usually shows up is a bunch of gibberish.

Now, we’re starting to get a bit desperate, especially if there is any kind of deadline involved. We’re starting to panic, when we see that ant crawling across the floor with a crumb of the snack we had earlier, or suddenly notice that book which has been sitting beside us, or we realize we had never seen that scratch on the table top before. Or, if we’re writing on paper, now is when the doodles start appearing on the edges of our page. A little heart, a big heart, a few smiley faces, a few frowns, some stars, then a moon, and how about… you get the picture, we are officially distracted.

After our little friend ant has gone and returned with twenty of his friends, and we went, made and set that ant trap, or once we have read the first three chapters of the book, figure out how that scratch just did get there, or else totally ran out of room to doodle, we return to the task at hand. Suddenly we realize that we’ve been sitting here all this time and hadn’t once thought of playing around with the hundreds of different fonts available to us! KINDS OF LETTERS WITH SO MANY CURLS AND LOOPS IT ‘S HARD TO READ WHAT IT REALLY SAYS. Big bold letters, wispy thin ones, FONTS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY COULD BE ANOTHER LANGUAGE, Others that appear to have come straight from some ancient tome. We could go on and on.

Then, at about the point where we are ready to give up, it happens! That idea comes back to us, that spark of inspiration we’ve been waiting for sets our mind on fire! We did it! Our itching fingers type down legible words, our pencils, blunted by use for all those doodles, now makes out those thoughts we knew we had stored away somewhere in that great big filing cabinet inside. After all that time and waiting, now this! We could do all that, or… we could have had a blast writing up a piece about not knowing what to write about. I did; Eureka!

~Halayah