I Have No Idea What to Write About

Lack of planning, lack of diligence (better known as procrastination), and just a plain lack of ideas can get to writers at any time. It’s certainly gotten to me this week . . . and the last week . . .

But writers need not know everything all at once. In fact, we can’t. All of us are built with different gifts, different capabilities. Some, like Frances Hodgson Burnett, had a voluptuous childhood imagination and enchanted other children with her stories. Others, I am sure, have a much greater aptitude for describing more plainly what they have lived, and only started writing when they had been adults for a long time, like Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Whatever our talents, any work of writing has a process of creation. Like any study, it begins broad and ends in details. I think that a story really is discovered, or uncovered, in some ways. We may not fully know what happened, or is happening if you’re using present tense, but we can know that whatever it was deserves our looking forward to and loving. Fear not; we do know what lies in story for us.

“God would like us to be joyful even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.”                    -Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof

“Todo aquel que piense que está solo y que está mal / Tiene que saber que no es así / Que en la vida no hay nadie solo, hay siempre alguien.”                                                                 “All who think that they’re alone and it’s bad have to know that it’s not so, that in life no one is alone; there’s always someone.”                                                                                               -Celia Cruz, “La Vida Es Un Carnaval”