Dear friend,
I wish you wrote. I want to read your ideas. I love your ideas.
I write, but it's not easy for me either. Even this sentence will require see endless revisions.
It's scary to stare at a cursor when all it does is lurch a few words and then back again. It's frustrating to realize you walked yourself right into a dead-end and have to turn around. Sometimes you get all the way to the end and realize you didn't have anything to say at all.
I've got drafts from years ago that I never finished. Most of them I never will.
No one is judging us. We don't have deadlines, grades, or word counts to worry about. No one's even paying all that much attention. We have nothing to lose. But we stand to gain that little spark of joy that comes with watering the seed of an idea and watching it blossom.
People have different ways of getting words down. Here's Kurt Vonnegut's point of view:
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter any more, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
I think life is harder for the bashers. Maybe you're a basher, and that's why you hesitate. I tend to swoop back and forth, writing and deleting pages at a time. I used to be more of a basher when I wrote under my real name, but somehow having the alias gave me more freedom to just take off in whatever direction I wanted, without being concerned about perfection. Maybe you'll find a trick that works for you too.
However you write, there's a great feeling when you feel like you're all done. When I say done, I don't mean perfect. I just mean done for now. You can always tidy it up later. As long as we can change, so can our writing.
And as long as you're my friend, I want to know what you have to say. So maybe not today, or tomorrow, but some day, I hope to be able to read it.