Today is Monday, it’s a little past five o’ clock in the morning where I am, and I’ve nearly finished my first cup of coffee. Forty percent of my thought is devoted to this post, while sixty percent is harboring thought of that second cup of coffee. I wanted to talk a little bit today about my writing process. Being that we’re all so different it stands to reason there are an infinite number of ways in which to go about finding inspiration, and this is just something to the effect of mine.
I wake my mind up with video games and music. Every day, just about. I’m an avid fan of baseball, so I’ll fire up my copy of the latest MLB The Show game and play a few mindless games of that, to get my hands and my eyes working simpatico with each other. While I’m doing this I put on my headphones and listen to music—more often than not something soft and unintrusive on account of the early hour. Worship music is a constant, as it puts me in a thankful for the day sort of state, and folk or acoustic stuff is also a good go-to. Bruce Cockburn is a Canadian singer-songwriter, guitar virtuoso, and poet, and lately his acoustic album Speechless has been one of my favorites in these early hours.
Mondays often find me very restless to write. I sing at my church on Sunday, and therefore Sundays are less productive when it comes to writing things. I’m perfectly fine with this, and thankful that I get to do that, but I do get restless when I feel I haven’t been creating or chipping away at a project. Since I’m working on my first novel at the moment, I’ll use that as my example of what I chip away at these days. I’ve heard it said that you should not overthink the first draft of something, but rather you should write and write all you can—letting the rewrites and edits come later. I don’t do it that way. I can’t do it that way. I started with poetry as a medium because I never made any progress on longform things, and with poetry I could obsess over every line and make it as perfect as I could hope to in the moment. I’ve gotten better at that with time, but still, I make slow progress when it comes to a total word count. If I can get a page done in a day, I consider that a day well-accounted for.
And the truth is that many mornings are not productive at all, despite my desire to keep a consistent schedule. If the inspiration isn’t there, I won’t force it. I might prod it—test the waters, so to speak, seeing if I can’t nudge it in the right direction—but sometimes it’s just not there. Depression is a constant inhibitor of progress, and sometimes the way to battle that is going for a walk. When I say battle, often the battle is picking myself up and putting on clothes and going out. That can be a huge victory on hard days. Seeing the beauty of God’s creation; hearing the so, so sweet sound of birds talking to one another about who-knows-what; looking at the gentle water; all these things can break black clouds. Maybe not all the way, but even a little is good.
I’ll leave this off with a poem I think fits well in tandem with this post! I hope everyone reading this had a beautiful day 🙂
The Writer
The writer sits alone; his legs
Are crossed in such a way as to
Be stable while he writes. He works
Amid a silent, unlit room.
The ceiling fan has constancy;
The sound it makes: a breathless hum.
A windy-whir the likes of which
Make working easy on the ears.
The writer waits to break the wall
Or be there when the wall breaks down:
To still the mind enough to see
A picture hiding in the reeds.
His hands are thin and ridged with veins;
His nails too short and have been since
His early days, much different days,
Though even then he watched at words.
The world outside moves on and on;
A siren sings a troubled song:
The writer in his measured world
Ignores this for the treasured reeds.
And what he’s found, he cannot say,
But something, surely, he believes.
And what that something may become
Is called a writer’s hallowed-hope.
He finishes the final lines
Of this new thing now brought about:
The writer sits alone, relieved,
And thankful for the page he sees.
Michael Riley Writing 
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