Many are the times I've sat down to write, feeling all geared up and creative, inspiration infusing my nerve endings ... and then ... paralysis. That blank page or screen stares back, waiting, reflecting what I increasingly perceive to be my hopeless inability as a writer to write anything.
The ideas I thought I had dissipate like wisps of cloud, or they crowd together in a huge lump, all pushing to get through a portal the size of a needle's eye, a kind of creative constipation.
Sometimes we have to sit down and write to a deadline or other requirement, but for the times when we just feel the need to create a piece of writing (when the muse moves us), it can be helpful to have a little push, a kick start if you will, to get things going. That way, the blank page or screen doesn't become our worst enemy, ideas can be captured and explored, and the creative block gets a laxative, of sorts.
As in passing conversation (like the one I just had with two Jehovah's Witnesses who came to the door, attempting to secure my attendance at their local Easter celebration), the weather is an almost inevitable topic. We are expecting a low pressure system tomorrow, coming down from the tropics laden with moisture and whirling with gale force winds, and so we talked about that, and how the easterly storms blow right into our little bay here with the occasional calamitous result.
The vagaries and whims of the weather can provide us with one of the best writing kick starts I know. I often begin a journal entry with the day's atmospheric conditions as my 'way in' to the writing I want to do. Call it a warm up, a setting of the scene, the opening of a door to more.
If that doesn't work for me, rather than suffer before the white page, I'll go for a walk, have a cup of tea, pull some weeds in the garden with Poppy the Neighbour Cat, or just go sit somewhere in the sun for a while. After any or all of that, I probably won't feel like writing any more, and that in itself is a solution.
So if you're not sure what to write about today, glance out the window, or step outside for a bit, 'look up and look down' as my dear friend Marge used to say, and tell me what you see, feel, smell and hear.
I can feel a warm breeze that foretells the arrival of that humid storm coming down the line towards us, I hear the waves swishing up the beach driven by the strengthening easterly wind that will be gale strength by tomorrow morning, I see the clouds thickening above, seagulls wheeling white against them, and I smell a hint of the salty sea.