It's not that we don't know what to write, it's that we don't know where to start.
It's as if the bewilderment of choice overwhelms the decision-making circuits somehow. The raucous din of 1001 ideas and desires and fears, all clamoring for expression now Now NOW! A man with 2 watches never knows what time it is and frequently misses the train.
But all that racket and hooplah just won't do. To write effectively, we have to drill down into the very word and phrase of it, take the idea's wings and polish them to shine, then fly it seductively into the gaze of their mind's eye to grab their attention.
The dance of meaning must be precise and properly dramatic, or one of the other thousand nearby explosions of sensory input will drown our words in the numb disregard of distraction.
The glint and glare of unwritten ideas can wreak havoc with our ability to begin, continue and finish with any semblence of sanity afterwards.
We're like sugar-high children at a carnival of possibilities. All the noise and magic and sawdust frenzy of the whole thing makes it hard to slow down enough to do anything except marvel, and want to do everything at once because it's all so amazingly alluring.
If only doing everything didn't mean nothing would really get done.
The other side of the same can't-decide is the slothful difficulty of actually FINISHING something and giving it final public birth. It's so easy and alluring to let it loll around unformed and unedited, always just about to be The Perfect Idea, The Perfect Piece. Just about....almost. Almost never happens.
Unfortunately, creation demands we slay The Possible to birth The Actual.
We have to make explicit, defining choices over and over again till we've soaked it in our intent and our vision. And no one can tell us how to do that but ourselves, because the answer is scribed inside places we can't even see without the creation acting as a bridge into them.
But so much of life is the direct opposite of that, a near-constant stream of discouragement and jockeying for position with little regard for what your say is. A tide of No's and demands that you must adjust to.
Writing is hard because it requires courage enough to simply have an opinion or story. But to take the time to nail that lofty butterfly down and tag it with words so others can enjoy it is even more difficult.
The butterfly would rather flit free afield, far from the semantic eyes of the reader. And it's easy to get entranced simply watching it fly around.
However, the net won this battle. Next time it may go to the butterfly.
Remember: you can't catch if you don't chase.
Start!
