3 AM. Or maybe later. Pink eraser bit spiders crawl ‘round and ‘round my desk. Why does my favorite thing in the world suddenly seem so hard? I want to write something amazing. I need to be great. But all that comes is the sting of blurry vision as I rub my eyes in frustration. 

I hate the term “writer’s block.” Because that makes me picture a block in my brain. A block that forms in my skull, makes it so that I’ll never have a good idea ever again. But writer’s block is more of a lull. A breath in a song, a moment of dull silence. 

“Write what you know,” they say. But I disagree. I believe writing is a power so deep that you can write things you didn’t know you knew. You can conjure up images and stories and thoughts, string together words that you didn’t think possible. 

Yet because of this, writing can be filled with uncertainty, with anxiety. You expect yourself to write a perfect first draft, to understand what you’re doing while you do it. All great writers write like that, you tell yourself. You sit and type, having no clue where you’re going, or why you’re doing it. But you still do it anyway because you never know.

Writing sometimes feels like running without knowing where you’re going. You know you’ll run out of steam. You know you’ll get lost. But you impulsively (and sometimes stupidly) do it anyways. You do it because you know that even though it’s scary and might burn, it’ll make you feel good, like you’ve accomplished something. So I breathe in the heart stopping feeling of failure, embrace the lull in thoughts, and just write until something, anything at all, shows up on the page.