As a writer, here’s what I know:
- The blank page paralyzes me.
- I’m fascinated by word origins.
- I want to throw away most of what I write.
- I love writing.
- I hate writing.
- I hate not writing even more.
Once in a while it’s as if God literally pulls words out of the air and wraps them around my pen. Those are the best times. Those are the times I live for.
I got my start by writing a company newsletter called The Last Bite. My employer gave me free rein to write about anything I wanted as long as it had to do with food and entertaining. That led to six years of freelance writing where I learned how to meet a deadline, conduct interviews and what the term “pull quote” meant. I introduced our readers to blogging and launched my own blog as an experiment.
From that “test blog” I moved to The Shared Table, where I wrote about hospitality and community and learned that more than anything, readers want you to be real. I swallowed my pride and wrote about the hard things in my life. Writing about them helped me to face them and move on.
Writing forces me to feel the fear and do it anyway. My current “Do it Anyway” list includes writing a book about “Re-words”, and self-publishing a book that’s been sitting on top of my desk for three years. There, I said it. And now I know what I think.
I think it’s time.
