Your Writing Doesn’t Have To Do This One Specific Thing

It is Highly Unnecessary. Do This Instead.

There’s something writers (cough cough, me) tend to forget about writing.

It is this…

Writing doesn’t have to be profound.

If you write enough, you’ll may come across something profound eventually. If so, go you!

But your writing doesn’t have to solve the question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.

(For one thing, it’s already been done. Douglas Adams says it’s 42.)

For a second thing, god that’s a lot of pressure.

If you feel like you have to write something moving and profound and valuable as all get out every time you write…you’re not going to write.

You will 1000% get stuck in your head, in a spiral of self-doubt, chewing your own arm because “oh god I haven’t discovered the secret so I can’t write about it what does 42 even MEAN…”

It’s not fun. And it’s not necessary!

You are allowed…

Nay, encouraged…

To write about small things.

Small moments.

Moments of light, moments of dark, moments of grey and pink and mauve.

Moments that meant something to you. Thoughts you had. Experiences. Observations you want to share.

You can write about the heartbreaking beauty of a specific shade of blue on a butterfly’s wings.

You can write about the book passage that made you imagine the butterfly in the first place.

You can write about how one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen didn’t involve your eyeballs at all. Instead, it was entirely implanted in your head by the writer of a historical fiction biography of Henry VIII which you definitely shouldn’t have read so young (the encounters with those six wives were…um…graphic).

You can write about how the imaginary internal monologue of Henry VIII as he contemplated marrying his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, when she was so young and he was getting old, created the most beautiful, iridescent shade of blue you’ve ever seen/thought/imagined.

And how that blue has stayed with you for decades, because the writer (Margaret George, for the record), gave you a place in your mind where a blue butterfly flutters against the dark brown of a tree trunk in autumn, a splash of color against the brown and tan and grey.

A moment of springtime as world goes to sleep.

You can write about that.

You can write about Tiny Beautiful Things. Colors and butterflies and books, and your favorite flower, and that time in college when it was storming and you got home to nestle into bed with a new book as the rain poured down outside, cozy and lamplit and warm.

You can write about those things.

Cause I just did.

If you want to read more about NOT putting the weight of the world on yourself and finding balance, read Ignoring These Hidden Aspects of Self-Care Can Be Deadly by the magical Liberty Forrest, Author.

PS — if you got the 42 reference, I love you.