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

Elaine Bennett
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

“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:

blog ideas —for when you need to write everything
blog ideas —for when you need to write everything

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.

    Elaine Bennett

    Written by

    Award-winning business storyteller & Mets fan https://bennettink.com/5x15-writing-challenge

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