How Badly Do You Want to Write?

I realized, while thinking about this week's Monday post, that today marks my 50th post since starting this blog. Bloggers are sometimes authors, writing full-time or part-time with the hopes of making a living from their writing. More often than not, though, they're people who want to share thoughts, ideas, political views, or creativity. Bloggers are a little more informal in nature; some post inflammatory opinions; some post a photo with three lines of text; some, like me, have a hard time keeping posts limited to 1000 words or less.

Because my blog is centered around books, writing, and the writing process, I thought I'd share a little bit about a man who had his own style of informal writing: my dad.

My dad used to write poems when he needed to de-stress. Sometimes the poems rhymed; sometimes they were inner conversations or deeper thoughts. Some of them were observations on life, like how long he’d wait outside the bathroom door in a house full of women, or his thoughts on what butt cracks were good for. (Yes, he had quite the range of topics.) He’d write the poems on scraps of paper and tuck them into his basement workbench drawers. Once in a rare while, he’d give one to someone specific, usually when he was bothered by an event and worried about the person involved. It was his own way of encouraging by expressing his feelings in a non-verbal way. We'd always figured he wasn't a big talker because my mom was (and still is) the talker in the family, but I think he came from a generation whose men trained themselves not to react too extremely to anything—don't cry, don't move too quickly, don't talk too much or too loudly. (And with my mom's Italian side of the family, don't try to get a word in at all. You can't compete.) 

He was once given a blank journal to write in and never used it, claiming that its formal nature made him feel as if he had to write "better." Too much pressure. He was content with the free 4x5” tablets given out as freebies from drug reps, those campaigning for local offices, or advertising their appliance repair businesses. It didn't make a whit of difference to him whether he had pen or pencil, spiral-bound paper, post-it note, or a scrap of napkin. He wanted to write and that's all there was to it.

He never wanted to make money from it (and to be honest, his writing was not the type that would have made him any), and was almost embarrassed when anyone wanted to see what he'd written. He needed that outlet—but for him, it was a personal thing, not to be commonly shared.

The ups and downs of his life were journaled, one small paper at a time, from his younger, single-guy years in the military (with Elvis!), all the way up to when he died after a lifetime filled with wife, daughters, grandchildren, pets, neighbors and friends. He wrote about all of them. 

How badly do you want to write? Stop making excuses. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Start getting the words out.