Have you ever had a thought whilst waiting for a bus, drinking tea with a friend or before you drift off to sleep and think, ‘I need to write about this’? For me, this seems to happen a lot and  that I’m forever scribbling half baked ideas onto post-it-notes or writing bullet point lists of subjects I want to write about.

Writing is a frustrating process, as I’ve said before, as I can picture the end destination but the map on how to get there is a little harder to read; it’s a delicate process of how to say something, with careful amounts of self-doubt, editing and that delicate balance of whether or not to press that backspace button.

One of the most frustrating elements that I’ve found is that an idea seldom appears when you’ve got a blank page in front of you.

It often comes when I’m busy, or when I’m daydreaming and caught my own mind wandering.

So in order to stop my ideas floating away with the clouds, I’ve taken to writing my ideas down whenever possible. I grab scraps of paper, post-it-notes or using my phone to store my ideas down.

But the problem then becomes that when I store these ideas in my notebook,  it becomes filled with these pieces of papers, it seems more filled with lists of things to write about than actual pieces that I’ve written.

It seems that instead of the logical idea of writing each idea from start to finish before writing the others down, I write a ‘to do list’, something that I hope to eventually get around to writing.

The only worry is that by looking at my thoughts or ideas I wish to write about, I’ll forget what it was that made me want to write about them in the first place.

Or a part of me worries that if I do remember what I want to write about, I won’t be able to reach that goal of what I wanted to say; instead writing something subpar, something that never amounts to the picture I’ve built inside my head.

But it doesn’t deter me, I still continue to write these lists because I hope that I’ll be able to cross them off, one by one, eventually; and perhaps, what I do manage to write in my ‘style’ will be something I can come to terms with.

I realise now that by writing lists, it’s part of my creative process and the way for me to be able write, and who knows, maybe it’ll help me find my ‘voice’.

Time to cross this one off my list,

– E