Show up to ship
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved wordsmithing. I know many of us do— in fact, most of my friends are wordsmiths, in one fashion or another.
And here, a tiny voice pipes up, “You might be living in a bubble, remember? Can you really say that since most of your friends are wordsmiths, the world is full of them?”
True.
But if you’re reading this, chances are, you love words as much as I do.
Your home may be filled ceiling to floor, room to room, with books. Or you write for a living. Or you live to write. Or you love wordplay. Or you love the light words cast in a darkened space. Goodness knows, how we wordsmiths love an elegant turn of phrase.
The trouble is, as much as we love it, we hate it, too.
There is not a wordsmith among us who has not struggled, wrestled, lost a night’s — or a month’s, or a year’s—sleep over a sentence, a paragraph, a book. Some of us are so keen to avoid that struggle that we avoid (at all costs) sitting down to write — or when we do write, we keep our burgeoning thoughts under lock and key, ne’er the world to see.
I was telling a friend I was thinking about writing a book and that the time had come, yada yada yada, and she said, quietly, so quietly I missed it the first time,
“That’s always been the plan.”
“What?” I asked. “What did you just say?”
“That’s always been the plan,” my ever-so-patient friend replied.
“Whose plan? Your plan for me or my plan for me?”
“Your plan. You’ve always wanted to write a book. You didn’t verbalise it as a plan, but I remember that when you turned 30, you were disappointed in yourself. You hadn’t written The Book yet, you said.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I remember thinking you’d set the bar high. Back in the day, not a lot of us had written the great American novel — or any novel — in our twenties. And here you were utterly disappointed with yourself. As if somehow, our lives, scrimping them together as we could, in cramped Paris apartments living on baguettes and cheese, with our shiny expectations and dreams, well, they applied to you more than they did to the rest of us. But you were one of the first single parents among us, living life for the first time, outside everything you knew. You expected yourself to defy normal twenties’ norms. You wanted to have written a book despite, and in spite of, the wild and wonderful woes our lives were throwing at us.”
“Spoken like a true writer, my friend,” I smiled through the phone.
“Yes, well …” I let the silence hold me there. “Twenty-five years later, I might have something to say.”
“Yes. You do have something to say. You had something to say then, too.”
Which brings me back to this post and to you, my fellow wordsmith. All of us have something to say. And yes, it may come out backward or sideways, or one inaudible word at a time.
But truth be told (and it will be one day), the only way to saying and writing and expressing our somethings is to show up.
Show up.
Start with one letter, one word. Try just one sentence. Or jot down a single idea or an overheard conversation that bounces around in your head or your heart.
Show up.
Write down that something, just for the fun of seeing it on a screen or a page or on the back of an envelope, a napkin. Play with it, like you would when you doodle or scat or scribble. No one is watching you or reading you or judging you. Play with the words and the ideas, the characters, and the big and little unspoken dreams.
Show up.
And keep showing up. Keep coming back. Keep playing. You’ll know when it’s time to edit and prune and shape. But for right now, keep showing up.
We will get to “ship”. We will.
But first, yes, I say this for me as much as I say it for you, show up.
