I Know Why the Blocked Writer Sings

Before any of this, I was a musician.

Sound came first, back when I didn't have the words for what I was reaching toward. Then a painter, chasing color across a surface until it felt like mine. Then a photographer, learning to wait on the light. Then a graphic designer, arranging the world into grids and type. These days I'm a podcaster, sending my voice out into the dark with nothing but a microphone to catch it. And newer than all of it, a writer.

Writing is the one I saved for last. It is also the one that scares me most. A melody can hide you inside its harmony. A canvas can hide you behind its color, a photograph behind its subject, a design behind the client who asked for it. Writing hides nothing. There is no beat to ride, no frame to stand behind, only your own voice, set down in plain words, standing there in the open.

Exposed.

Which is exactly why I'm disciplining mine on purpose, out in the open, starting here.

There's a verse early in Genesis I return to more than I probably admit. Call it nostalgic ADD. I wander off, and somehow I always end up standing in the same doorway.

Genesis, chapter one, verse three.

And God said, let there be light, and there was light.

Just before it, darkness upon the face of the deep. Then a sentence. Not a hammer. Not a blueprint. Not a brush. A voice, spoken into nothing, and the nothing answering back.

Light.

I'm not claiming any of that grandeur for myself. I'm saying the first tool anyone was ever handed was a voice, and what you do with it still matters, maybe more now than it has in a long while. So much of what reaches you today was generated by something that has never lived a single day of its own life. Smooth sentences. Clean grammar. No fingerprints, no hometown, no pulse. A real voice stumbles. It repeats itself. It laughs at the wrong moment, and it carries the weather of wherever it was raised. A real voice, a specific one, an individual one, is getting rarer.

Which means it's getting more valuable.

I couldn't connect with that kind of value when I was younger. Back then, the pen was a spigot. I'd pour ink onto the page, raw and unedited, and lean back convinced I'd struck gold.

And just like that, 40.

That was the grade my high school English teacher slashed across my paper.

I remember reading the praise first, her notes lingering on what worked, on the voice. Then the red ink arrived, a disruptive chaos of it, the page looking like it had been through something. Humorous now. Tragic then.

Lol.

To her credit, she never missed my creative voice. She highlighted it, announced it, circled it like a landmark. That much was undeniable. And still I was heavily misunderstood in my ideals, and I couldn't tell you why. At the time I had no vocabulary for the gap between being heard and being understood, and nobody cared enough to walk me through that warpath, to sit down beside the red ink and translate it into a way forward.

So I ran. From writing anything, for years. The page became a room in my own house I stopped walking past. Door shut. No light under it.

"At least I can focus on the things I say," I told myself. As if speech were the safer cousin. Spoken words, after all, don't come back to you marked in red.

There's another verse I hold just as close, from a different book entirely.

Matthew, chapter 18, verse 20.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

I used to think those two verses pulled against each other. One voice, finding itself alone in the dark. Several voices, becoming something together around a table. Solitude on one side, company on the other, the empty room against the full one.

They don't pull against each other at all. They're a sequence. You have to become someone in a room by yourself before you have anything worth carrying into a room full of other people. The private work, the internal work, the homebody work was never the destination. It was the entry fee for a better union.

That's the whole reason I want to build something here beyond just my own work. A network of people making things and meaning it. A place where your becoming and mine stop being two separate stories.

Pull up a chair. Look around. Take your time.

And if the road ever gets unclear while you're here, you already know what to do.

Clean a room. Then come build with me.

A brilliant epiphany, if I say so myself. Who knew more direct instructional notions would bring me back to a table with parcel and pen.

And now, a little bit of that color my teacher so charmingly remembered.