Keith McNulty starts his day, every day, by solving a math problem:
Every morning before I start work I tackle a math problem. I schedule 30 minutes to solve this problem, and if I don’t succeed I stick with it the next morning and subsequent mornings until I have solved it and I am ready to move on to the next.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/start-your-day-math-keith-mcnulty-eqsye/
He does it for a variety of reasons, all of which he mentions in the rest of his blog post, but in the main, he does it to exercise his brain, and to give him the confidence to start the rest of his day.
I’m totally on board with the idea, except my plan is to write a blogpost here on EFE to start my day. And the reasons are the same – it is to exercise my brain, and to draw interesting connections across different things I’ve been reading or thinking about, and to give me the confidence to start my day.
And when things go well, I wake up knowing what I am going to write about, and how I am going to go about it. Those are the good days.
But there are other days, such as this one, when I wake up without knowing what I am going to write about. And then it is a case of reading blogs and articles, bookmarked tweets and conversations on WhatsApp and Signal, and multiple cups of chai or coffee, and the hope that inspiration strikes.
Sometimes it does, and we’re off to the races.
But on other days, I might read about something that depresses me.
Maybe I will read about the inevitability of World War III. Or I’ll read about the many mistakes that all of us did during the pandemic. Or I’ll read about a war taking place in some part of the world, or about the hubris of some politician somewhere… as you can imagine, there is a long list of topics to choose from if I want to read about something that depresses me. The trick then is to quickly read something that cheers me up, but this is, alas, a trick I cannot always perform.
But worst of all are the days when I just don’t feel like writing. Not because I’ve read something depressing, and not because I don’t know what I am going to write. I just don’t feel like writing.
It happens to the best of us!
And so what should one do on days such as these, when inspiration just won’t strike?
Well, one could choose to give up and not write for today. Or one could keep going through unread blogs, until one comes a blogpost written by one of the best of us. Who just so happens to have written a post about, well, not being able to write:
I remember getting stuck on a plot problem while writing my second novel. I just couldn’t sort it out. I tried everything. Walks. Swims. Crosswords. Even rounds of golf. Seriously. Nothing. This was a devastating block. Finally, in despair, I started a diary, a journal, into which I poured all my frustration. It went something like this.
“Dear Diary, I am mad. Hopping mad. I just can’t solve this problem. I have to get x to do y without z knowing. I have tried making sure that z is out of the way, but that doesn’t work because …”
On and on like that, typing furiously at this diary, until …
“Of course I could always do something mad like have x go out of the house late one night and … oh my god, yes that would work. And then a could tell b that y was not there and z would be none the wiser. Actually that would make complete sense and I could…”
The details are irrelevant, but the point is I solved a writing problem by writing. If you see what I mean. I couldn’t solve the problem by talking to myself, by muttering curses, by walking or approaching the 5th green with a nine iron. But I could solve it by writing about it. Priming the pump if you like.
So maybe writing only happens when you are physically producing the words, whether by pencil, biro, pen or keyboard.
Maybe.
https://stephenfry.substack.com/p/words-words-words
Far be it from me to correct Stephen Fry (the horror of the idea, even, let alone actually doing it), of course. But based on my experience of having written this post, and the enjoyment I derived from having read his, I would recommend removing the final word from the excerpt above. For that is how writing happens!
Maybe.
EconForEverybody 