"I don't know what to say"

Every morning I like to do a writing warm-up in which I type one hundred words on whatever topic comes to mind. Often these words are fiction: bits and pieces of stories, character sketches. Less frequently, I write about myself: my past, my thoughts about life, writing, motherhood. Today, though, I placed my hands on the keyboard and...nothing.

I have so many words I want to write, so many thoughts I want to communicate, but at that moment they all escaped me. I think there are times in life when there's so much to write about that the writer just can't get her head around anything in particular, and she's left to gaze helplessly at the screen, hands quiet on the keyboard. This was one of those times for me.

Finally, though, after many moments spent flipping through my mental file of all the ideas and thoughts I'd like to give voice to someday, a memory came to mind about my past as a college instructor out in Nebraska. I wrote about that time this morning, and tonight, since the piece sums up not only how I was feeling then but how I'm feeling right now, I've decided to repost it here:

When I was teaching college English, I would ask my students to freewrite in their journals, either to brainstorm ideas for their essays or in response to an in-class writing assignment. I would walk around, observing them, and often I would see students whose pens weren't moving, whose pages weren't filled. They would tell me "I don't know what to write," and I would respond that those are precisely the words that they need to be writing--"I don't know what to say"--over and over again. The rest would follow.

I don't know what to say...

And all is (finally) well

Yesterday I finally got over whatever it was that was preventing me from starting my WIP. Now that I'm over that hurdle, I think the rest of the story will follow much more easily.

It's funny... One of the courses I taught as a college instructor was composition. Students would often come to me with complaints about how much difficulty they were having starting their essays. My advice was always the same: start somewhere else in the essay and go back to the beginning later. For some, this method worked. The rest insisted that they couldn't write anything unless they had a good beginning, and they would struggle until they finally hit upon an idea. I, as evidenced by many of these blog posts, fall into this second category. This is one case where I just can't practice what I preach.

Back in the Dark Ages

Before I had children, I was a college English and journalism instructor. I left that job when my then-husband and I moved to another state. A couple of years later, after my divorce, I moved to yet another state and started working from home as a freelance editor. I enjoy editing, but unfortunately, after my second child was born, I no longer had the time to take on as much work. I miss it.

Recently, however, my sister-in-law asked me to take a look at a novel she's written, and I feel like I'm finally back in my element, the world of language and words, punctuation and grammar. I'm looking forward to hanging out my shingle again years from now when the kids are in school.