Over the last two weeks I have spent countless hours at the computer writing. Sometimes I knew exactly what I was going to write about and other times I had no idea. As occasional writer’s block cropped up here and there during book writing, I wondered about the necessity to get out your daily gripes and personal issues (daily pages) before getting down to the good stuff – the creative writing.
I suppose all the writing is creative – making up words and putting them to paper – but sometimes it seems the words don’t come because I am stifled. Stifled by my inability to get a word on the paper. Getting ‘the’ or ‘once upon a time’ seemed futile beginnings, but weren’t they better than never starting at all? Maybe if I had written my daily pages, getting started would not have been so difficult because the junk would have already been cleared away.
Is daily writing as important as some many other daily tasks we do in the name of health – eat, brush our teeth, or shower? If I don’t write, is it true that no one would want to be around me in the same way that no one would want to be around me if I hadn’t showered in a week? I know I should write every day, but I don’t. I guess I don’t ‘smell’ the need for writing and I ‘let it go’ longer that it should. This reminded me of a husband and wife with varying tolerances for what is considered a ‘clean’ bathroom. Eventually the bathroom has to be cleaned, much like the mind needs to be cleaned of words, it just depends on how long a person can stand it. Now I am hoping this little scouring is enough to clean my mind so I can get on with writing my book.
I am looking forward to the home stretch on the writing of the book this month. Just two more weeks and I will be back to blogging at my regular pace, which seems a snails when compared to the speed in which I am writing this book!
Quirky Contemplation 
I believe Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice to Henry David Thoreau was to write. Every day. (Apparently you needed 3-names, too?)
Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.
Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published there was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in The Dial in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first journal entry on October 22, 1837, reads, “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.”