I Don’t Know What to Write About This Week

I’ve been a freelance writer for six whole years on Friday (there’s a bottle of fizz in the fridge, ready and waiting).

During that time I’ve written a new blog post almost every week, ideas tinkling and splashing like water from a well.

Until this week, when the sun came out and the well ran dry.

I did what any reasonable person does in the face of a crisis, and turned to Google.

“Try taking an image off the internet and writing about it,” someone suggested.  So I Googled “image” and this was the first one that came up:

It’s a picture of someone taking a picture of a bridge.  I’m not going to get a whole blog post out of that, now am I?

The other suggestions focused around the advice I sometimes offer other people when they’re struggling.  Write about something funny or interesting that happened to you, or something new customers tend to ask about.  Write about something you did, or you love.

But I’ll be honest: I can’t be bothered to do any of that.

It’s not helping that this is one of those frustrating weeks when nothing I write fits.  My words don’t look right on the page; it’s like I’ve outsourced the writing part of my brain to Mr. Bean.

(I’m saying this after writing three paragraphs about something quite interesting that did happen to me this week.  But I deleted them, because they read like watching beige paint drying, on a windowless wall in a bare basement office).

I doubt anybody would notice if I didn’t write anything this week.

But it’s my six-year anniversary as a writer, and what sort of six-years-as-a-writer would I be if I didn’t persevere?

OK, how about a post about ‘six lessons I’ve learned from six years in business?’

(Yawn)

I did that last year.  There were only five lessons then, they haven’t changed, and adding an extra one for the sake of it feels… well, a bit pointless.

I suppose I could cobble something together about personal creativity, particularly since I’ve got a new Wondrous Writing Hub starting in September.  But it feels fake to write about personal creativity, when personally, I’m out of creative ideas.

Or I could just write this.

Maybe it’ll show that no matter how long and hard you’ve been working at something

– even when it’s something you love, and you have no intention whatsoever of giving up on it –

there are still those minutes, seconds, hours, and days when it all feels a little bit off.