Angela Kelsey

Writing the Prompt

When I wrote this morning’s writing prompt about not having any words, I was wondering if maybe i had hit my limit.  That’s it: no more words.  Certainly no more written ones, and maybe no more spoken ones either.

“No such thing as writers’ block,” I’ve been known to say.

But for the past two weeks I’ve been working and worrying and editing a little and talking a lot and writing for other people and other projects  and planning and gathering material for another longer post on faces of oppression and another one on Arundhati Roy . . . but feeling like I had no new words and none were forthcoming.

Yesterday when I realized that I hadn’t even posted a prompt on Saturday, I  began a day of looking under every sentence read or uttered; every ball hit miraculously with a tennis racquet; every taste, emotion, random thought, actions of Gracie and Max: there, is that an idea?  No.  Boring.  Maybe that one?  Hollow.  Over there?   Nope.

Until I went to bed still looking without success  to my pre-sleep thoughts, and later dreams, still coming up empty, but knowing there was only one more place to look, the place where words always show up: in writing in my journal, pen in hand.

So after I posted a virtual blank page, I drank more tea and opened the book to another kind of blank page, and wrote without thinking too much.   They arrived: ideas for blog posts, certainty about the priorities of projects at hand, insights, calm, perspective.

And words, words, words.