A friend of mine once told me repeatedly that writing was like a Nike commercial. One must remember one thing…JUST DO IT!! Don’t think about it. Just write. Every time he would mention this I would secretively roll my eyes. I’m a planner. Well, I at least like to think of myself as a planner. Then, over the Christmas Holiday, my Muse dropped a load of words and story line on me. At first, I was a bit intimidated by the amount of information coming to me; so much so that I found myself over thinking nearly every angle to death. This nearly ended the story before it began. Then one morning I woke to a completely quiet house. A rarity. I grabbed a notebook, a pen, and a cup of coffee. I pulled up a chair at the seldom used kitchen table. Picking up the pen, I just started writing. I didn’t think. I just wrote. I let the words and ideas that came to my brain flow through the pen onto the paper. When I was done I had five or six pages (front & back) of a story outline, four pages of character descriptions, and two fully written scenes. I amazed myself. I did it! I just did it. I wrote. No analyzing. No picking apart. Just writing. It felt so good. I found myself nearly every morning, or evening in some cases, sitting down over that notebook scribbling out the thoughts in my head. The voices. The stories they were telling me.


I’ve found when I’m stuck, I just write about something else - even the process itself. I write about not being able to write. This somehow always leads to finding my way back into my Muse’s hands; guiding the story that was given to me. Now I don’t have to try to write. It comes. When it comes, I just do it.

Writers always talk about word count. I started counting just out of curiosity. How amazing it is to watch yourself go from struggling to get 500 words to making yourself stop at 2000 because you have to sleep and eat at some point. The best part is, as more words hit the pages, the better the work tends to be.

An apology is in order then… to my friend, who grins and holds back his “I told you so’s”. He was right. While I may have put my writing on the back burner for a couple of decades, my writing was only waiting to pour out on to the paper. Waiting for me to just do it.