Nothing Left to Say

I'll confess that I'm sitting here with this blank page only because I know the month is winding down, and I have quite a few posts to write in order to meet my quota.  It is hard to knowwhether the exercise of writing is worth the fact that I'm actually sitting here with nothing to say.  What do I type--and how much of it--to fulfill this portion of my creative goal?  Would dear Anne Lamott or talented Stephen King tell me that the post itself is the important part, and the content can all be crap that all of us want to delete later?

In Bird by Bird, Lamott gives aspiring writers a few tips and offers insight behind the scenes for readers.  She says that you should write just a square inch of the story, you should write a certain number of words or for a certain number of minutes each day, that you are allowed to delete what you wrote the day before if it's no good, and that not everything that happens to you is interesting.  That last tip is probably the reason for tip number three.

So here I am.  A writer, with nothing left to say and a goal to meet.  I want to be a writer.  I am a lover of words, and I want to be a writer.  I am a writer.  But I want to make my living by creating stories that entertain and make people think.  Stories no one has ever told before.  (Dare I say it, some even better than anyone has told before.)  If I'm a writer, then I have to write.  Because the point truly is the exercise, the working, the digging deeply, the creation.

Anne Lamott also says that the process of writing is about asking oneself, "How alive am I willing to be?"  As a writer, that really is the question.  Even when the answer takes a boring form, maybe the key to me being a writer is me being willing to be fully alive.  And me being willing to sit down with a blank page and muscle through this exercise, knowing that some day it will pay off.

Because I am a lover of words.  And one day I will write a book.