I had to write a column this weekend for this week's paper but it didn't happen. I didn't feel like writing, I didn't have an opening or a point. I know what I want to say, I know the picture I'll publish with it but nothing else would come.
I couldn't put muscle on the skeleton of my idea.
Yet this is where the real writer parts ways with the pretend writer. As a real writer, I know I only have to sit down at my desk and start typing, typing anything, even starting in the middle of the column, to get the column written. Or do what I ended up doing: sitting down with my notebook and start scribbling, jotting down the ideas, each one clinging to a rib then another rib then another.
Until that moment -- which as we know seems to happen for me when I'm in the bathroom -- as I'm putting mascara on and suddenly, the opening then the point of the column
DING!
was there in my brain. My whole body relaxed. Skin formed, enclosing everything. The writing is the easy part now.
You can't know how much I rely on that real-writer system to get things done. Total trust that it works. Just write. That's how you get published.
That's how you only get one eye properly made up.