Are you a writer who is having trouble actually writing? If so, perhaps you can relate to this. I’m starting this day in the life of a writer blog series to share some of my own wrestles with writing by documenting my daily life. Maybe it will give you some ideas…
****
She sat at her desk, staring at the blinking cursor, wondering what she was supposed to write. “Write, and the words will come,” said the voice inside her. Was it her own voice? Her own thoughts? God’s instruction? Sometimes it felt as if her mother whispered words of encouragement to her from another realm.
Why did Marnie do everything and anything but write? Sure, she wrote some essays on modern issues for her Facebook wall. She’d write the occasional poem. She even wrote a song. She’d started one chapter of a dystopian novel, but couldn’t bring herself back to it. The thought of actually writing a book, a novel, she avoided like the plague.
Why? she asked herself. She sensed that writing a novel would suck her into another world that she couldn’t escape from.
Fiction writing had been her escape in years past. It was a world she could go to and forget that she was miserable in her marriage. It was a place where she controlled the outcomes, the challenges, and the landscape. She could create lovable heroes and strong heroines. She could live in another time and place without modern pressure or demands. Happy endings. Always happy endings.
Marnie associated fiction with a time when she needed to escape from life. She didn’t need to escape anymore. Her life was wonderful, magical even – if she paused to really look at it and absorb the miracle of it all. She felt as if she were sleep walking through life sometimes. She needed to fully wake up and embrace it all.
Each moment held magic in it, yet she couldn’t seem to absorb it all. She still felt a little like parched, cracked earth that had received a flood of water and didn’t know how to absorb it all, so it just ran off in all directions.
To escape into fiction felt like hiding from something she needed to face – she needed to face the present and truly soak it up, enjoy it, slurp up every last delicious drop of it. Yet, time blazed by in a blurry flash. She knew she missed things – important things that needed to be savored and enjoyed. She had no idea how long this delicious feast would last. The buffet of possibilities sprawled before her and there didn’t seem time to taste it all, not enough room in her stomach to enjoy more than a spoonful of each delicious dish or dessert.
Maybe that is what she could write about – the present – the world she now enjoyed. She didn’t have to use her imagination to conjure up some future day of challenges. She had no need to hide away in simpler times. She could write about the here and now. If she went into observer mode and documented her current world and the beauty of it, perhaps she could digest more of it. The value of writing is that the words and memories would be there for her later to reflect upon, over and over again until she could absorb every last morsel of it.
Maybe she was living her novel. Maybe it was right in front of her every single day. Let’s see… let’s try it with this morning.
*****
Marnie’s dream was one of those where you keep trying to solve a problem but it never resolves. You seem so close, but then the problem remains. As her mind worked and reworked the fictitious and impossible math problem that had something to do with the number 400, her husband’s voice broke through her sleep.
“Gotta go. Love you,” Dave said before placing a butterfly kiss on her lips.
Marnie’s eyes groggily opened as she looked up at him. Realizing she’d been drooling, she rolled over enough to wipe her cheek on her hand that rested on the pillow. Did he know she was drooling? How embarrassing! How bad was her morning breath?
“Oh, love you too,” she croaked.
“Wanna say prayers?” he asked.
“Sure, go ahead,” she mumbled and closed her eyes.
Dave prayed… something… Marnie wasn’t alert enough to absorb the words.
He kissed her lightly again, strode toward the bedroom door, closing it behind him.
She glanced at her phone. 7:00 am. Marnie decided she’d go back to sleep, but first a bathroom break. Nestling back in bed, she set her alarm for 8:30 am and closed her eyes. She said a prayer in her mind. She had three questions she intended to meditate upon:
- What do You recommend I do today?
- Help me see my value – my real value.
- Is there anything I can do to repair my strained family relationships?
She tried to be quiet and listen to God’s answers to those questions, but she fell asleep.
Her alarm sounded loudly at 8:30 am, and she jerked toward it, pressing the snooze button. Again, she intended to meditate a bit. She thought of her three questions.
Again, she fell asleep. She felt so exhausted lately. She had been doing a lot more physical labor. She worked out at least four days a week and had been doing a lot of yard work. It seemed she could never rest enough.
Again, the alarm sounded and this time she determined she would get up. But, first she at least wanted to know how to spend her day. She had so much freedom, so many choices. She needed God’s help in determining how to use her days wisely.
She listened for a moment
Feed the chickens.
Okay
Write something.
What?
Anything. Just write.
Okay, what else?
Check [Client Name’s] Facebook ads, load some of his Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram photos. Make a cover image for one of his programs (that doesn’t have to be done today, but write it down).”
She pulled out the Wunderlist app on her phone and started typing in the thoughts that came to her mind:
Go to the gym.
Take Elijah’s suit to the dry cleaners.
Paint the bedroom upstairs.
Uggh, she wasn’t thrilled about that one. Marnie dreaded painting that room. She was two-thirds the way through with the job.
If you finish it, you can move all the furniture where it belongs and your house will look and feel better.
True.
Marnie got out of bed, washed up, put on her sweat pants and checked the temperature. 44 degrees F. She decided to do the gym a little later when it reached 60 and she could drive with the top down on her convertible.
Marnie put on a long sleeve shirt, her hoodie, and her warm jacket. Stepping out on the front porch, she headed for the chicken coop. The coop was a couple hundred feet from the house inside the old goat pen. She unlatched the door of the goat pen, stepped toward the chicken coop, and could hear the chickens clucking inside. It was nearly 9:00 am, and they liked to get out earlier than that.
She unlatched the door to the chicken run area, grabbed the blue kneeling pad and placed it on the bottom wood of the doorway. Marnie knelt down, then removed the piece of wood that wedged the chicken house doors closed. She propped open one of the two pieces of wood that served as the door by sticking a twig between two slats in the side of the chicken coop and letting the piece of wood rest on the twig.
The chickens didn’t emerge immediately. She dumped out the old water from the double dog bowl that served as their water feeder. As she refilled one side with a bottle of fresh water she’d brought from the house, the two black silkies emerged, then the two white ones. They scattered around the pen looking for something to eat.
Marnie stood up, fastened the chicken run door closed and grabbed the 1 gallon pail containing corn and laying pellets from under the hen house. She tossed four handfuls of the mix onto the ground inside the run for the chickens, put the lid back on it, and placed the bucket back under the hen house.
Next, she lifted the outer door of the hen house to feel for eggs in the nesting box. Her hand felt three eggs. Two of them were decoys. Silkies like to set. So giving them a couple ceramic eggs to always have in their nest would keep them laying regularly.
The ceramic eggs were slightly larger than real eggs. But the easiest way to feel the difference in the two types of eggs was by warmth. A real egg was much warmer than the ceramic ones. Marnie pulled the one real egg out of the nesting box and set it on the hay that was piled on top of the hen house. She double checked the corners of the nesting box to make sure there were no more eggs.
Marnie closed and latched the hen house, grabbed the egg, wrapping her fingers around it and enjoying the warmth of it in her hands. It was like holding a hand warmer. She moved the egg from one hand to the other, letting it warm her palms and fingers as she went toward the exit of the goat pen. Latching the metal door closed behind her, she stepped a few yards from the hen house before realizing she’d left the plastic water bottle in the goat pen. No big deal, she’d grab it later.
Simple pleasures, she thought. A warm egg in your hands on a cold morning. She wondered if the chickens could tell the difference. Did they miss having a warm egg under them when she took their eggs? Did the ceramic eggs really give them the satisfaction a real egg did?
As she strode back to the house, her thoughts were about the hens and how they might feel about laying their eggs only to have them taken shortly thereafter.
When Marnie reached the house she set the egg in the bowl on the counter where she kept the fresh eggs. As long as you don’t wash them, you don’t have to refrigerate them for up to a week.
She washed her hands, removed her coat and loaded the dishwasher. She noticed some crumbs on the island and washed it off with a Lysol wipe. With a sense of accomplishment, she started the dishwasher and removed her hoodie.
Marnie still wasn’t in the mood to write anything. She sat down at her computer, watched a video from her feed and shared it to her Facebook wall. She forced herself to get off Facebook. That could suck the day away. Next she checked her client’s ads and posted to his various social media outlets.
Marnie checked the items she’d completed off her Wunderlist App and stared at the word “WRITE.”
Deciding she was thirsty, she returned to the kitchen for a glass of water. She actually went to the kitchen three times before remembering the water. She got her hoodie jacket from the back of the kitchen chair because now she felt chilly. Then, she realized she’d forgotten the water. So, she grabbed some bags off her office floor and carried them to the pantry. While going down the hall back to her office she realized that again, she’d forgotten her water. The third time was the charm.
She opened the lid, drank a swig and placed it beside her on her desk.
Write.
Okay, what?
Just write…
She wrote one sentence about the times in which she lived. Perhaps another essay exposing the illogical nonsense of our modern era. No, not that. She erased the sentence and began with…
“She sat at her desk, staring at the blinking cursor, wondering what she was supposed to write. “Write, and the words will come,” said the voice inside her. Was it her own voice? Her own thoughts? God’s commands? Or sometimes it felt as if her mother whispered to her from another realm.”
