My writing teacher’s watch word is also his first rule of writing; “just write.” Honestly, I now fully supports this idea. The whole reason I put up this blog is so that I could record and share my work. This blog will just be for fun because right now in my life writing is just for fun. But I still had this nagging feeling, somewhere in the back of my mind, that my first real post had to be something that I look back on, satisfied to say that this was my first real blog post.
So I sat, rocking back and forth in my favorite purple rocking chair, and thought and waited for inspiration to strike in the form of an idea, a first sentence, worth its weight in gold. I shot down almost all of my own ideas, quickly declaring them not worthy, not good enough. My paper stayed as white as a polar bear in as snow storm and as blank as my mind.
That’s when the doubt set in. What if I just couldn’t think of anything good enough because I wasn’t good enough? Maybe setting up this blog was actually a stupid idea. “What ifs” floated in my head, clouding the true vision that leads to all the best writing. I even tried doing my first draft on the computer (a habit I never want to make) but the pitiful spotlessness of the screen scared me further.
Finally, a friend of mine called “Crystal” set me straight. “you can’t just put up the good,” she said. “The good is what comes out of the bad.” So the next day I followed the first rule of writing, back in my purple chair, and I wrote about anything and everything. I pondered Crystals words and took them to heart. Soon, I was pushed into that magical zone all writers can tell you about and I decided to write this piece. My good writing will come out of my bad like a rainbow from a rainy sky, and the only way to catch it is to write everything. Every idea can become something beautiful. So I will do my best to give everything a chance and fill this blog to the brim with half grown and rough ideas so that maybe I will stumble upon something striking. But for now, this will have to do.
-astrid lightly
