Nearly 2 years on Substack:

One reason I've kept at it

Photo by John Rodenn Castillo on Unsplash

I’m coming up on my two-year Substack anniversary, and I just keep enjoying it. Each week, writing helps me to open my eyes to something new or to soften around the edges.

Here’s one example I’ve noticed recently: I used to think that new ideas are incredibly hard to come by. I was terrified each week that I wouldn’t have anything to write about the next week. I’d wake up in the night, fretting. 

Nearly two years in, I’ve realized something magical about the world: Ideas are EVERYWHERE. They are like small-winged creatures flittering and fluttering around us all the time, as ubiquitous as the bugs and the birds. I don’t consciously search for ideas anymore, because I’ve found ideas don’t respond well to being hunted down and caught and put in a jar. Instead, I’ve started trying to be patient and letting them find me. I wait and trust, and at some point during the week, I’ll get a little inkling: usually a few words or a phrase. And quick as I can, I’ll pull out my phone and jot down those few words. That’s how all of these posts start—a few words. And then I sit down to write and each time, those few words multiply.  

What I keep learning here is how to let go and trust. A little less trying so hard. A lot of it has to do with spending enough time in that unwatched place I wrote about last week. Then, as

Elizabeth Gilbert

put it in Big Magic, “The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you . . . . The idea will organize coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen . . . . And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, ‘Do you want to work with me?’”

This way of thinking about ideas means settling down the ego, which often has its own notions about what an idea should turn into. Matthew Quick of

There Will Be Mistakes

wrote about this in a just-right way in a recent post about putting aside a novel he’d worked on for years: “Over the past fifty years, I have slowly learned the value of being the leaf in the stream,” he writes, even while his ego screams, “Your novel is genius! You can’t sacrifice it!”

Here’s the thing: This is not just true of ideas. I think it’s true of people too. I am meant to make certain things and not others. I am meant to be certain things and not others. Not every writer can be the biggest or the best or even anywhere close. Little by little, I’m learning here to trust those little inklings that tell me when I’m fighting against the current and when I’m swimming with it.