Write What You Know

When its windy, I see him. He is always already waiting, like these lines. Until my fingers touched the keys, the words were nowhere. Then suddenly, they were leaping out; impatient, ready. It is this way with things that I think and see. They are never there and always already there. When the conditions for appearance are right.

It's been a long time. You know. You could write for the rest of your life without a hitch, it doesn’t matter much what you write. If you are a writer, you write. When you stop writing, you call it writer's block but that ‘block’ is really the problem of thinking there being a specific product that has to come out of all of this. You’ve forgotten this is a process of discovery. You have forgotten of the Lords of Life. You are a petty shop clerk with no religion.

Some say "write three pages a day," some say "write one." The things is, if you are a writer, there is no such thing as a number of pages. There are only words and they will continue for the rest of your life. You will be putting down these words until there are no more. And when you realize that everything is words anyway, there will be no more writers block, there will be no more waiting, there will be no more doing everything instead of writing. There will be no more doubt about your talent or if you have stories to tell, because you realize ALL YOU HAVE ARE STORIES, but the hard part is getting at them- and this is only hard if you forget that the telling, itself, will figure its own tail out.

The beginning, the rambling, will conjure its own end. And really, there will never be an end to beginnings, middles, and ends, only spaces of time where you cut yourself off from a certain piece with one certain name and then continue it under a different name. These are the things I know, although I know nothing. These are the things I am saying now, though tomorrow must wind its own way through.

(photo courtesy of Victor Alvarez)