When I walk about my life, doing what people do, I get all these marvelous ideas of fantastic stories that I just know would be outstanding, if only it was a good moment to write. As it was not, most often, I tell to myself I will remember it and easily write one or two stories, just like that.
Well, well, well! Faced with the empty page my mind goes blank and I wonder why am I trying to write in the first place, if I do not have a story in the pipeline. And then, I am run over by the memory of all those stories that could have been, but weren’t because it was not their time.
I find that when I am tired my mind is so uncooperative, it does not want to work with me at all and let me spin a world out of thin air. I am rarely well rested so me coaxing my mind has become the norm. But the urge to write and create is more powerful than my human nature and I trod along doing what I can with what I have.
As I grow older I start to understand the value of joy more and more. The more you advance in your timeline, the more acutely you become aware of the things that you will miss and your joy just crystalizes somehow in you and you start to find joy in the most unexpected things and especially in the things you love.
If before you like gardening, now you have a passion for it. If when you were younger you liked to take walks, now you become an avid walker, and so on.
Maybe this is one good thing about advancing in age that you do start to find joy in your life where before you only found tasks.
I have started taking notes on my phone when I get ideas out and about, and reading through them just now I find they lacked a bit of context to jolt my memory to what had actually given me the idea. Another thing that holds me back is that often, not always, my ideas are a bit dark and pessimistic, and I want my stories to have a positive spin somehow.
The world is too dark for me to bring any more darkness into it, I want to bring joy and hope and I want to console and encourage. It will be ok.
So I promise to take better notes of my outstanding ideas on the go and I will get better, word by word, sentence by sentence, story by story.
Dark or light - I am always glad to read your stories. And yes, the world has a lot of darkness in it, but perhaps writing about that is a way to shift it, bring it more out into the open. I wouldn't want to only read things that were feel-good. As long as there is a moral compass - which your writing always has.