Stories Are About WHO
What if you just have nothing to say?
You want to write; you have ideas floating around your head, and maybe even that cursed cursor blinking disparagingly at you, your doc open, page blank. But it’s not a symptom of writer’s block—where you can’t figure out how to say what you want to say.
It’s a slow-growing dread that maybe you have nothing to say.
That all your ideas, however imaginative in, well, your imagination, are re-treads of well, everything else out there. That messages you had in mind, your why for writing, are cliché at best, redundant at worst. That everyone else can say—and has already said—what you think better than you’ll ever be able to. So why bother writing?
But if you’re wanting to write, if there are ideas in your head, you do have something to say. It’s not the what of your story that is going to make it shine, it is the who: YOU. Your voice. Your choices. Your interpretation. Even Shakespeare borrowed his plots from tales past, so if it’s good enough for the Bard, it’s good enough for you.
So when that cursed cursor is blinking, or the pen heavy in your hand, start with just one word. That word that got you thinking. Love. Jealousy. Sky. Airplane. Whatever. Write it down. Then walk away.
There: you do have something to say.
(Now you just add 99,999 more of those words, and you have yourself your story! 😊)