I have got to find some easy way to choose things to write about. Right now, my only focus for making 2019 the year of WRITE is to keep the daily discipline of showing up at the page*–just showing up and writing is, I’m guessing, going to be the only goal I have for myself during the rest of January. And maybe for longer.

So if just showing up at the page is my goal, then I would very much prefer to lessen the time spent on the “what the hell shall I write about tonight?” stage of the process.

Seriously, y’all. I have spent nigh unto an hour gaming and wasting time on the iPad whilst this went on in the endless internal loop:

I need to go start writing, but what the heck am I gonna write about tonight? I’m wasting time trying to figure this out, cos I need to go start writing. But what the heck am I gonna write about!?!

Well, maybe those “hecks” were actually “fucks.” But it’s a decently accurate transcription…

You may have noticed, a couple days ago when I was talking about Julia Cameron, exactly how familiar and comfortable I am with the language around calling myself a “blocked creative.” The yearning to be creative and expressive is a pretty strong constant in my emotional & energetic system. As is the sense of being blocked, or not having anything worth saying, or the ninety-eleven other ways I have to shut myself down.

And, as I have done with so many other topics, I have accumulated a small library of books about sparking one’s creativity or journalling practice.

(This isn’t even all of them. Not by a long shot.)

Of course, one of the other features of this particular self-defeating pattern of shopaholism and clutter I’m so good at is that I buy the book to aid me with whatever area of personal growth is currently troubling me**, but then I just put the thing on my overflowing bookshelves. As if just owning the thing is going to magically imbue me with all the wisdom and benefits the book contains.

Believe me when I say that hasn’t really worked so far.

So I’m thinking that I might try to kill two birds with one stone. Pick one of these books of prompts and exercises and keep it on hand. Then, on nights when I don’t have something front-of-mind, let that choose my topic for me.

* I am enough of a digital-as-a-second-language dinosaur that I will continue to use these pen-and-page writing metaphors until the day I die. Besides, “showing up at the page” sounds way more elegant than “showing up at whatever this blank pixelated field is called in WordPress”

** Creativity, my career, mindfulness, money, spirituality, what-have-you. Including a small library of books about how to lessen shopaholic and clutter-hound tendencies. (Now that is ironic.)

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