What if I run out of things to say?

This thought just struck me last night, as I was driving home from a long day of Christmas shopping. What happens when - not if- I run out of things to say? There is only so much that can be said about writing, and even less that can be said about it by me.

And yet, I've been writing, and talking about writing, for years.

I knew less about writing when I first started talking about it, and it didn't stop me then.


I think part of the problem is running up against the old "The more I know, the more I learn about what I don't know." When I was a kid in high school, talking to other high schoolers about how much I loved to just free write and see what happens, I had no idea what I was talking about. I'd never read Stephen King's On Writing. I'd never taken a composition class. I'd never written more than a few dozen pages, which was little better than Star Wars with a female lead.

But what I was talking about in that class was real, because I was still talking about my experiences with writing.

No, I've never been published. No, I've never even completed a single rough draft of a novel. I don't even really try to. I might some day, but none of that matters. I still write, I'm still a writer, regardless of whatever my goals with said writing may or may not be. Most days, its simply for my own entertainment, or to shut the insistent characters in my head up, or to explore a nugget of world that happened to cross my mind earlier, or to avoid doing the dishes, or any number of stupid reasons that don't matter to anyone else but me.

And makes them the most important reasons in the world.

-R