Elusive Words

What do you do when you feel you have nothing to say?

I tend to type out lyrics to whatever awesome song I’m listening to. This is something my close online friends know me for. Sometimes, I hand-write them instead. I suppose if that’s the case, I do still have something to express, I just can’t find my own words. But how do we go about finding our own words when they elude us?

The first 10 minutes of English class my last year in high school were spent writing in our journals, a journal that no one else would ever see — it was just for us. If we had nothing to say, we were supposed to write about how we had nothing to say. The goal was to keep the pen moving. Within the 10 minutes, almost without fail, I would come up with something to say. Like a visual artist sketching or doodling before working on a real project, it was a warm-up exercise.

Sometimes that little bit of warm-up is all we need to loosen up enough to get creating. Sometimes we need to work on a different project for a while. Sometimes we need to go for a walk, or work a bit on the rest of our to-do list to get things off of our mind. And sometimes creating is just too difficult to do, so we give it a break for a day and go back the next. The trick is to figure out which tactic we need.