Hour for a Word

Sometimes, when you’re writing, words seem to flow as seamlessly as a stream. Other days, you just can’t figure out what to write. Then there are those very unique moments where the words are flowing and you come to a dam. You know water can flow past the dam, but for some reason, you can’t quite find the words to get past it.

When I can just write and words flow, that’s easy. I can write paragraph after paragraph when the words just come to me. In my best season of blog writing, I was able to write three blogs in one day because I had the flow. Then, literally happening at this moment, the flow gets interrupted.

No one called my name, no one stopped me from writing, yet the brain almost stalled. It is usually when you know what you want to say, but you’re just not sure how to say it. It’s not the same as writers block. At least I wouldn’t call it that. I’m not at a loss for ideas. It’s phrasing. I’ve got a complex idea that needs proper words.

The other end is simply tying ideas together. You know what point a and c are, but how to get there isn’t as clear cut as b. It could be a word. It could be a sentence. Or it could be a whole paragraph that needs to mold two ideas together but just simply isn’t there.

I recently had this happen with “Intricacies of Theology”. The words were flowing really well that day. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, mostly because I had literally just written creatively before and flowed right into the blog. Then, I had a single sentence left. The end.

For some reason, I didn’t know exactly how to word it. I wrote it out three or four times but just couldn’t find the explanation. After pushing through for a while, finally, I moved on and came back to it later. Still after returning, I found myself unable to articulate the final sentence of the blog. When I inevitably finished, I had spent as much time on that single sentence as I had on the entire blog.

It wasn’t a lack of inspiration. I had a version of what I felt like I wanted to say in my head. That’s the challenge with writing, though. Sometimes, you can write a whole blog in minutes. Sometimes you spend an hour on a word.