Writing is amazing. We’re all on blogs because we like writing. If you like reading, you must like writing because they go hand in hand. You can’t have reading without writing.
The funny thing is that when you write, people expect you to always know what to say. It’s flattering and frustrating. It’s great to be a person that people think of when it comes to having the right words, but it’s not necessarily true either.
Sometimes, you just don’t know what to write.
You know you should be writing, but you just don’t know what to write about. Every now and then you have an idea to write about something that you don’t know much about or that you aren’t currently experiencing. Then there are those times when you have everything you’re going through stand out in a way that you just have to write about it. And then there are days when you just don’t have anything to say.
Should I talk about a Bible verse? Should I talk about relationships? Do I talk about something I experienced today? I don’t know.
The pressure of writing gets tough to handle. Somehow we start focusing on what people are expecting or what we think they are expecting from us and we start to miss the fun of just writing. Who cares if no one cares about that topic today? You do. Who cares if it wasn’t what everyone expected to read? You wanted to write it, and that’s OK.
My fellow writers, your readers like getting to know you. They enjoy a brief glimpse into your thought process. And you enjoy giving it. It’s OK to write for you. It’s OK to use the therapy of writing for an audience of one, yourself.
The strange thing is that once I take the pressure to always write exactly what I feel like I should, and I start to focus on the simple joy of writing, the ideas start to flow. Things start coming together like never before, and a masterpiece is written. The majority of things I’ve written that have been the most effective are the same ones that seemed to be the least impressive to me.
The irony of writing is that when something is written from the perspective of the writer, no matter what they’re going through, no matter what the topic is, and it’s raw expressive literature, people love it. People want to know you as a writer and the best way to know that is to read what you wrote and feel what you were going through when you wrote it. We forget that even though we write for others to read, the joy in reading is relating. And when we write for ourselves, in essence, we are writing for others at some point in time.