A Quick One While He's Away

It’s been a while since I've written, and it is for two reasons that I can tell.  

One-writing is hard.  I have always found writing difficult.  That line that writing is staring at a blank screen until drops of blood form on your forehead has always felt very true to me. It has always felt satisfying once something I’ve written is done, but getting to that place has always felt like a tooooon of heavy lifting for me, and at times I shy away from the lifting.  

The second reason I took a break from my writing is that I got lost.  I got lost in what and who I was writing for. Recently I heard an idea on writing attributed to Kurt Vonnegut.  “Write for only one person,” they said.  “And let that one person be you.”  As soon as I heard this I knew two things.  One, they were dead on.  Two, I was dead lost.  Not that I didn’t believe in the things I had written when I had written them; I did and I still do.  But I realized that I had been writing to try to please or affect other people I had in mind, and when I did this I lost me.  Not only did my writing suffer, my want to write suffered as well.  Maybe we change the old adage a bit.  Instead of write what you know.  Write what you want.  

I can’t help but feel a pull to make this into a deeper metaphor, (and there is one,) of the power of knowing what we deeply want. But I don’t want to.  I’d rather stare out the window of the hotel lobby I’m in right now, and trust that for now this is enough.  

Write, create, for one person. And let that person be you.

See you soon-

J