It occurred to me today that I’m lucky to not have run out of things to say.

There have been some scary times, working on this blog journey for the past three and a half months. One of the scariest things is sharing stuff with all of you that I am afraid could get me in trouble.

One of the most regular fears that I have is a fear of running out of things to say.

Interestingly enough, that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve gotten pretty close, a couple of times, to not having anything to write about, not having anything to say. But then, something usually comes to me and I have enough lead time to be able to write it up and publish it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that some of the stuff that I am putting out is ‘not my best work’. There have been some posts that I’ve put together that felt like drivel, when I was done with them, and I hit the publish button because I’d decided that it was as good as it was going to be. Other posts have been wonderful statements –if only in my
opinion– and I am excited to have other people see them. It’s pretty similar to the way that I am running toward my weekly running goals.

There are days when I am running and my performances have been inspirational; on other days, I feel like I am barely surviving what I’m doing when I got out to ‘pound the pavement’. Today, for example, I ran a 10K during which I psyched myself out five times, resulting in a less than stellar performance.

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I know that I have mentioned this a couple of times in different posts, so I’m not necessarily letting a cat out of the bag here, but I am working on some creative writing –a series of related novels– as well as maintaining this blog.

That process has been a bit more of a struggle than blog post writing.

Imagine, if you will, that you receive in the mail, every few days, an envelope. In this envelope, there are five or six puzzle pieces. On some days, the puzzle pieces are related to each other, such that you could put them together without even involving the other pieces of the puzzle. On other days, none of the pieces relate to each other, but rather, they relate to what you’ve already received in the mail, or
–worse yet– they don’t relate to anything and you just have new pieces of the puzzle to set aside, for now, until something later connects. And, of course, there is no ‘finished puzzle picture’ –> that oh-so-valuable tool to the puzzler. And, it just so happens to be a thousand-piece puzzle.

That’s what novel writing has been like for me.

By comparison, writing these blog posts is a similar process. Waiting for something to come in the mail. Receiving it. Having to put it together. But, with these posts, I get an envelope (or maybe two or three) and they total a ten-piece puzzle. Sometimes, I’ll sit down to start writing a post –like this one– and the whole thing just flows out because all of the thoughts are in my head somewhere already and it’s just a process of putting them altogether in the proper order on the page. Other times, I’ll sit down to write a post, and it’s not all there; in those cases, I leave the post in a ‘draft mode’, hoping for some future point in time when the other pieces come in the mail.

* * *

If I can bridge that previous metaphor into this section, to discuss a different concept; sometimes, I think I have finished the puzzle, and then an envelope comes in the mail and it’s more pieces to the puzzle.

What I mean to say is this: there is this point when I make a decision that something is done, but then, many times, it occurs to me that there is something more to say on a subject or there is an additional piece that could have been added to an article. But, that’s the thing. There isn’t any adding. I can’t go back to something that I published last week and add to it because additional thoughts come to me. I said it was done, and I put it out there as done.

Imagine the sculptor, who would walk into the art gallery, where his art is on display, to climb up on a ladder next to a sculpture to chisel off just one more piece of marble from the face, to cause the jawline to stand out just a bit more evenly. Or, imagine the painter, who adds a brush stroke to a canvas on a wall in a studio exhibition.

When you pour out all of the water from a glass of water, when you’re done, you stop pouring. You turn the glass back right-side-up. Now, when you do that, is it the case that there is still water in the glass? Most certainly there is. Could you have accomplished a greater level of completion if you’d tipped that glass for an additional second, or five or sixty –> probably. That decision that something is done isn’t necessarily a correct decision.

If I stop vacuuming the living room floor, it’s not because there’s nothing more in that carpet that should be removed. It’s because I feel like the job is done. Is that decision correct or incorrect?

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I told a close friend of mine recently that I feel like the inspiration that I get for doing the writing that I’m doing comes from outside of me. And, anyone who’s read enough of these posts, or who knows me well enough, would know that I am a Christian. Christianity doesn’t necessarily blend very well with beliefs in things like muses or the like, but I do know that I am filled with the Holy Spirit of God, and I feel like He has been inspiring me to do this writing that I’m doing.

This corresponds pretty well, I believe, with other inspiration that I receive from the Holy Spirit, throughout my regular life. When the Holy Spirits prompts me –moves me– to do something to show God’s Love to the people around me, that process feels pretty similar to how I get inspired to write. When God helps me make decisions that I struggle with, through prayer and reading His Word, the proper choices end up becoming clear similarly to the way that my writing materializes.

The most frustrating part of that, for me, is that it seems to come out of the clear blue, and I have to capture it in some way so that I don’t lose it. This morning, in fact, while I was running down the road, I got an idea for a blog post. You should have seen this idiot, running down the street, recording his own voice into his phone –while gasping– so as to not lose an idea from his mind.

Maya Angelou once described the process of her inspiration as having to capture something onto a piece of paper before –and I’m paraphrasing, here– it flew away like a butterfly.

And now that I have this butterfly captured, I am going to decide to be done.