Writing on Those In-Between Days
It’s one of those days.
Days when there is nothing to write. No, there is no block. No, it isn’t even the drying up of the word-well. It’s not even that feeling of being tapped out. Nor word weariness. Words are still jingling and jangling, but they have no path to follow, no story to tell. No novel to plough through. No idea to breathe life into.
It’s one of those days, those days that are in-between. The thought fox has yet to penetrate this loneliness, but something still needs to be written.
Such days have occurred before. They come and go. You learn to ebb and flow with them. Such days leave me at a loss with what to write. Write everyday, yes, that is an easy advice to give, but so hard to follow. What do you do on such a day? The day after your last story reached the end. On the previous day, you floated with a warm fleeting feeling of accomplishment. And now, here you are, stripped bare, starting anew, and not knowing what can ever be written.
How are things written down? How does this work?
It’s time to rediscover the process again.
It’s one of those days when writing a poem would suffice. It would still my frenzied thoughts and convince my mind it wrote something. A long poem would do. Or even a short one. A Haiku perhaps?
A poem's length can’t be judged when the first line is written, nor when the thought is given words. Somedays the thought is so well snuggled in words, few would do. On other days, it takes a while for the words to forge. On the days of short poems, the word count may be low, but the thought is done justice. Yet the lingering question troubles my mind:
How much did you write today?
When you can’t create you can work.
- Henry Miller
It’s one such day when old writing gets the attention it deserves (or does it?). They get pulled out, musty and waiting, ready to be edited. The second draft…the third draft…the eighty-ninth draft…and so it goes. But sometimes, the desire to write, to create without using the screen is high and how can that feeling be justified on an old story, already created, already written?
It’s one of those days when a blog post comes into existence. A piece of non-fiction, a personal essay. Like this one. For the sake of my mind to know, it has written something, created something. It is not fiction, there is no story — only a semblance of one. Yet, something has been written, the page has been dirtied, and I, I am content.
Akshay G. masquerades as a writer and is currently honing his character killing skills. His dream is to cure the entire world of the pestilence known as pigeons.
