Day 12: The Moment of Giving Up: Don't

Sometimes we have nothing to say. No brilliant plot twists. No new characters. No jokes. No tears, laughter, shouts, dances, songs, mornings, nights, fears, hopes, smells, sights, sounds, feelings, or cravings: Nothing to give that blank section of the page. No words. No wisdom.

Oh yes I have those moments; those days.

 We run out of thoughts or don’t know where to start. We grasp at tendrils of inspiration, almost crying when they slip through our fingers. We turn away from our keyboards and go look for something else to do. We tell our selves we’re looking for ideas, sometimes we are. Sometimes though, we’re just running away.

We’ve discovered that writing is hard: its work. It’s no longer romantic and right now it certainly isn’t fun. We want to stop.

This moment, right here, is the moment in which more might-have-been’s have been born than any other. This is the moment of giving up.

But we can’t. We have stories to tell, dreams to follow, we can’t give up! But sometimes we do. We walk away and let our stories fade into dry husks in notebooks and on hard drives.

To write is a choice we make every time we sit down at the keyboard, every day we wake up with stories in our heads. Sometimes writing doesn’t sound very appealing. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it doesn’t seem worth it.

But that choice is there, that choice to go on building your world and giving your characters voices, or to walk away and do something easier: clean house for example. Some days it’s terribly appealing.

Right now we’re in the middle of writing 50,000 words and it’s hard. We want to stop. We want to find an excuse as to why we can’t finish or we just want to slip away into the shadows and hope everyone will forget we ever started this thing.

Don’t.

I can’t give you a good reason. I can’t give a solution, but as someone who knows how it feels, I’m asking you to keep going; to find some small reserve inside of yourself and go on writing. Your story deserves to be told and somewhere in the world there is someone who needs to read it, or who will someday need to read it. Write it for them if for no one else.

Write it for all the stories that never got told and all the people who wanted to hear them.

Maybe you won’t write anything good today, maybe you won't all month, but as long as you’re writing you’re working your way closer to something better then you could have dreamed of doing.

Writing is bigger then you. It’s more. It’s a Gift.

So write. Please write. Write and keep on writing until every story you have has been told. Then go find some more and write them.

Just…Just write.

~ Rita