Terrifying

 

I'm not sure what I thought I was going to write about this sentiment, but I'm pretty sure I thought it applied almost exclusively to novelists and those pouring their soul (rather than straight technique) into their writing.

But in the last day or, oh, week or so, I've found myself terrified by the blank page. Moreover, I've found myself doubting my abilities to fill said page adequately by the (non-)feedback of what you might call stakeholders. 

But, this: I was in a meeting on Wednesday with what you might call a high-powered executive who gave me a small but meaningful piece of advice. She asked me how I got into writing, then told me that she thought it was a gift.

A gift.

"If you can write, you are very fortunate," she said. "It's a gift and you should use it well."

People talk about gifts all the time—he had a gift for running, or piano, or physics. And they say it ad nauseam about writing, so I've always ignored it.

But there in the empty boardroom, as the sun sank low over the skyscrapers and the evening chill crept out early from beneath the leaves of the trees in the park across the street, it struck me: a gift.

A gift.

What if I had a gift? Imagine.

If this was a gift, then writing would not be the mere putting together of words, puzzle-like, to convey some sense. If this was a gift, then I would have something unique, precious, unable to be replicated.

Imagine.

Somewhere around there, for the first time, I began to conceive of the merest spark of an idea that maybe this was something more than a commodity. Maybe I wasn't just a mouthpiece for this woman's corporation, and others like it.

Maybe I had something to offer of myself.