Writing When the Spirit Taps Me on the Shoulder

My writing prompts work the same way life does for me: loud, overlapping, and usually inconvenient.  Today’s thoughts arrived as I was heading out to recess. Naturally. Not while seated calmly at a desk with a notebook and a warm beverage, but while moving from one responsibility to the next. I didn’t have a pen to write cheat notes on my hand, anyway, that’s so 1999, so I used speech-to-text on my phone instead. The artist formerly known as Prince has passed, God rest his soul, and I figured if the world can survive that, I can survive dictating half-formed ideas into a rectangle of glass.

Sometimes I have epiphany moments. Sometimes two or three at once. They don’t wait for their turn. They don’t politely form a line. They arrive like toddlers, each needing something right now. What many readers don’t know is that I have a dozen or more fully written pieces sitting quietly in the wings, waiting for the right season, the right mood, or the right moment to belong together as something larger than a single post.

With ADD, I’ve learned a hard truth: if I miss a thought when it arrives, it may disappear for days or weeks, if it returns at all. Before I ever published my first word, I kept lists. Twenty-five or thirty topics I hoped to expand someday. I guarded them carefully, like rare artifacts.

One hundred ten blogs later, I don’t rely on lists the same way anymore. Now I rely on listening. Because here’s what happens next. I come home after clearing out a full day’s worth of clutter, mental, emotional, and otherwise, hoping to unwind with a Christmas Ale. That’s when more thoughts explode. As soon as I try to jot them down, life intervenes.

The missus needs this. Can I carry that upstairs? Oh, and there’s a new organizer for the She Shack that needs to be assembled immediately. Suddenly, I’m Bob the flipping’ Builder, toolbelt on, moving at full speed, feeling like I work the assembly line at McDonald’s, perpetual motion required. If I stop moving, the whole system shuts down. And if I give in to every item on the honey-do list without pause, those delicate, half-formed thoughts vanish, booking one-way airfare to the Island of Lost Treasures.

So now, I listen more carefully. I trust the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to guide my thoughts and temper my tongue as ideas come flowing like a river. I don’t try to dam them anymore. I will write when they arrive. I hold them when they ask to be held. Some pieces insist on being written immediately. Others are content to wait, patient and unfinished, trusting their time will come.

Some thoughts arrive fully formed. Others arrive like seeds. My job is to notice which ones are meant to grow next, before they sneak off to the Island of Lost Treasures without me.