“Write everything” — How Lin-Manuel Miranda pans for gold

“Write everything.”
I found this screen-capture from an Ask Me Anything Lin-Manuel Miranda held on his Twitter feed awhile back.
Mr. Miranda and I don’t write the same things; we don’t share the same style. But we do share an attitude toward writing, which only makes me love him more.
He doesn’t believe in writer’s block any more than I do.
So what do you do when you don’t know what to write? You write. Anything and everything. Just cover the page. “Bytes on disk” as a friend of mine used to say.
Sometimes the writers in my 90-day writing challenge tell me they can’t think of anything to write about. I tell them to write, “I can’t think of anything to write about” over and over again — like Bart at the blackboard in the opening credits of The Simpsons — until they’re so tired of writing that sentence, or sentences like it, that they finally let an idea break through.
Notice I didn’t say “…that an idea breaks through.” No, no — your inability to write is not the ideas’ fault. It’s your brain’s. It’s telling you a story about how you’ve gotten blocked. Or you don’t have any inspiration. And you — you’re accepting that story as true.
Well, stop it!
Write everything — it’s about to get meta in here
Yes — full disclosure — it’s past 7pm on Sunday, a day I was supposed to take off. Remember the “day of rest” concept? Yeah, me neither.
And yet dinnertime found me still at my desk, dealing with a balky computer and an as-yet-unwritten blog. Inspiration? You think I have inspiration?
But I do have a folder called:

So I said a little prayer to the blog-idea gods and clicked it open: Voilà! Lin-Manuel Miranda to the rescue.
Originally published at BennettInk.com.
