“Spend it all now,” Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life. Don’t hoard your best ideas and words, saving them for a more opportune time. Some ideas take time to germinate, of course, but a seed must be planted in order to grow.
Sometimes I spend my writing time describing little scenes that come into my head and end up going nowhere. Sometimes I lay out lines of poetry that sound good at first … and not so good later. Sometimes I avoid writing altogether. Sometimes I write clipped little phrases that I can’t seem to shape into poetry, so instead I end up copying out lines of songs or poems that I love. Why bother writing something new when Paul Simon or T.S. Eliot or Bono has already said it better than I could?
I spent a long time crafting my last short story. I wrote and rewrote and threw out a lot of what I wrote. I fell in love with the characters. I was amazed to see scenes coming into focus and detail as I worked, developing like Polaroid photos. When the story ended, I thought, “That was it. That was all I had. I’m out of ideas.” And I spent a lot of time looking for a new story, writing little blurbs that led nowhere. But last week, one short anecdote planted a seed in my mind, and that seed has rapidly sprouted into a seedling story. I am at the roughest rough draft stage, typing as much as I can about every character and every scene I see. And so the story grows.
Maybe those other hours that felt fruitless were actually useful for composting and tilling the soil so the story seed could take root and grow. I know that I am working on a real story right now, not just an exercise. Whether it will be a good story remains to be seen. But it is a story that I can finish. When I am done, I may think, “That was it. I’ve spent everything; I have no other stories in me.”
This is the writing life, and this is the life of faith. Using all you have, giving it all away, trusting that even if you have nothing left at the end of the day, you will be given what you need to do all that you are required to do.
Posted by Elise 
