Some nights I sit down to write and there’s nothing there.
I check the top of my head, find it empty, and conclude I’ve run dry. Forty-seven years of material and the drawer’s bare. Nothing worth anybody’s time.
This has been happening my whole life. What’s different now is that I’ve stopped believing it.
Here’s the thing I finally figured out. The top of my head is not the well. It’s the last four things I thought about, and if none of them were interesting, the whole inventory comes back empty.
But if I sit still — actually still, long enough for the day’s noise to drain off — something always surfaces. A conversation that stuck. A small thing somebody did. A memory that arrived for no reason I can trace.
Nothing has ever failed to come. Not once this year.
The trick isn’t finding material. It’s tolerating five quiet minutes before the panic sets in.
For most of my life my response to a blank night was to not write.
That’s it. No struggle, no discipline problem. I’d sit down, feel nothing, and go do something else. Then I’d do the same thing the next night, and the gap would open, and eventually I’d have not written for two months and would tell myself I’d been busy.
I look back at those stretches and I can see them clearly now. They weren’t dry spells. They were nights I quit early, stacked up.
What I do care about is whether it’s worth opening.
I don’t want to fill a slot. If somebody gives me four minutes of their evening I’d like them to get something for it, and the test I use is simple: did I surprise myself. If I write my way into something and think huh, I hadn’t looked at it that way, there’s a decent chance somebody else will have that reaction too. If I didn’t, I probably shouldn’t have posted it.
Almost fifty years leaves a deep well. But I’m not interested in reminiscing at people. The old material only counts if it connects to something happening now.
I know what my bad posts look like, because I wrote a lot of them a long time ago.
They’re the inspirational ones. Younger me wanted to be Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy — wanted to say the uplifting thing, get people fired up, be the voice that moved somebody’s Tuesday. And because I didn’t actually have a settled position on any of it, everything I produced was contrived. Motivational-shaped words with nothing underneath.
I misunderstood what those men were doing. I thought the job was inspiration. It wasn’t. They were laying down foundations meant to hold up under a lifetime, and the enthusiasm was just the delivery vehicle. I copied the vehicle.
I’ve written something every day this year. Even on vacation, which I did not expect of myself.
Not because I’ve had something to say every day. Because I’ve stopped mistaking a quiet mind for an empty one.
David Willis 