Karly

Every Sunday evening I find myself having the same conversation, although it’s entirely one-sided. What am I going to write about this week?

It’s become something of a ritual now, which is ironic because there was a time when I always knew. My posts were planned weeks in advance, or at the very least I had a rough idea by Thursday, and Sunday evenings were reserved for editing rather than staring at a blank page wondering whether I’d finally exhausted every remotely interesting thought I’d ever had. Somewhere along the way that changed and, while I couldn’t tell you exactly when, I can tell you that these days I spend the last few hours before publication convinced that this will be the week I have absolutely nothing to say.

The ridiculous thing is that a lack of ideas has never really been my problem. If anything, I suffer from the opposite affliction. In the space of an hour I’ve considered writing about anniversaries and how some dates never quite lose their emotional weight, chronic pain and the quiet ways it changes the rhythm of everyday life, the lives we almost lived, Helena Bonham Carter’s wonderfully eccentric characters after watching Enola Holmes 3, the clean girl aesthetic, Eloise Bridgerton, and whether having a remarkably good memory is more of a blessing than a curse. Every single one of those ideas has crossed my mind this evening, and every single one has been dismissed almost as quickly as it appeared because surely none of them is interesting enough to become an essay.

Whenever this happens, I inevitably find myself wondering what Virginia Woolf would’ve done. Not because I imagine she floated effortlessly from one masterpiece to another without ever doubting herself, but because she had an extraordinary ability to begin with something impossibly small and, almost without you noticing, transform it into something quietly profound. A room, a walk, a flower, a dinner party, an afternoon spent observing the world from a window. Nothing and everything at once.

Perhaps that’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been waiting for an idea that announces itself with complete certainty, when most of the pieces I’ve enjoyed writing have begun as nothing more than an observation that refused to leave me alone. They weren’t fully formed when they arrived; they became themselves through the act of writing, quietly gathering momentum until, somewhere between the first sentence and the last, I realised I’d had something to say all along.

Maybe writer’s block isn’t the absence of ideas at all. Maybe it’s the peculiar habit of convincing yourself that every idea is hopeless before you’ve given it the chance to become anything else, or the tendency to assume that everyone else’s thoughts are naturally more interesting than your own. I suspect every writer has a small voice that insists this week’s essay will be the one where they’ve finally run out of things to say, and perhaps the only difference between the ones who publish and the ones who don’t is that someone, at some point, chooses to ignore it.

The irony, of course, is that while I’ve spent this entire Sunday evening wondering why none of my ideas was any good, this page has filled itself with them. Perhaps the real Sunday ritual isn’t wondering what to write after all, but it’s convincing myself that I’ve run out of ideas, only to discover, every single week, that I hadn’t.