What Makes You Stop?

There is a house on the top floor across the street from me that lights up completely red. Every time I see it, I stop to wonder what is going on inside that all red room? For the past few days the light has not been on, and I wonder why? What has stopped happening in that red room?

It could be a story, it should be a story, but by the time my key gets in the door and I start thinking about whatever it is that I need to do–or the nothing I plan to do after a day of work–that story never gets written by me.

I always have the urge to write. Even when there is nothing to write about. It is soothing to me to think about something that I might write, or something that I will write. I was stalling on a post for this week, and then this idea came to me because it was exactly what I was doing.

Stopping.

Is it writer’s block or fear that prevents you from getting the words on a page? I wrote this post when I was planning on writing whatever it was I wanted to on March 1, but yet I have not written very much at all. It is fiction that I am lamenting now, because I have been keeping up with this blog and morning pages. I want to create a world though, a sultry one. I crave this story even though I have not written it yet, or completely imagined it yet, but I know it. I know every contour of it, its breath, its passion…I especially know its breathless passion.

What makes me stop is time, and the perfectionist that lives in every writer. I have gotten better about the perfectionist in me, constantly reminding myself words are not indelible. Ideas honestly need to be jarred like fireflies, because if you forget them no matter how bright they are their light will permanently dim.

I hate to make excuses, but stopping is natural to the course of a writer…fortunately so is starting again…

photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons