28 9 2023
The man sat down at his little desk to write.
It was raining and windy outside and the wind blew the rain sideways sometimes.
The man sat at his desk but he did not know what to write. The man doubted himself. He knew how to doubt himself very well. He knew he could always find a reason to doubt himself – but it was also this quality in the man that made him a good writer. That’s because it takes a sharp creative edge to imagine countless ways to doubt oneself. In that way, creativity is a double-edged sword, and the man knew this, but he didn’t always remember it, which is why when he sat down to write he just stared out his window at the little rain drops on his window and he listened to the wind howling. Then the man stared at his typewriter. He bought the typewriter because he thought it would help him with his distraction problem, but he was not sure it helped with anything because he still could not write.
“Why should I have to write something pretty to be a creative person?” The man thought in protest. “Aren’t my thoughts and I creations enough – ongoing creations – by themselves? What about putting my words on paper increases who I am?” The man examined that thought, and when he saw that the thought was itself a creation, his hands moved to his typewriter and he wrote about the thought. He wrote about it because it felt like a fun thought – the idea that creations and creativity are everywhere – and because he thought that others might find the thought fun as well.
He watched his creation unfold on the paper. The clacking sounds of his typewriter mixed with the splashing sounds of the rain and the howling sounds of the wind. The man did not know who might ever read his words after he wrote them, but that, he knew, is the nature of writing as opposed to speaking. Writing is like putting a message in a bottle and tossing the bottle into a roiling sea. After you toss the bottle you walk back up the beach and already you start forgetting exactly what it was you just wrote. And after that, the man thought, you wonder about how the act of forgetting is also a form of creation, even if it is creation in reverse, like a burning log. 