I woke up Thursday at a loss. Honeydew Ever After is in another resting
stage, waiting to be emailed to one of my readers when she’s ready. The twenty pages I’ve written on my next tome
haven’t grabbed me yet. I wanted to write but I needed a topic.
I
pondered, and realized it had been a long time since I submitted a blog post to
South Shore Living Magazine, so I decided to write about a restaurant/pub that opened
a year ago in our town. When visitors arrived last fall, it was brand new and we checked it out
together. Since then, we’ve ignored our
constricted cash flow and eaten there two more times, first for our daughter’s
birthday and then for our anniversary. Each
delicious meal left us craving another visit. All I had to do was describe the food
and decor to come up with a post. Done and done.
My point? When you
get stuck, write about something you like. Yesterday, I chose to write about a restaurant we’d enjoyed. Had I not though, I could have written about
the calendar page beside me, open to a photo of four bottles, filled with
flavored vinegars—colorful glass containers glimmering orange, purple, yellow
and red on a rustic wooden table, amidst rose petals and sprigs of lavender.
If I’d been stuck later in the day, I could have written
about the tart smell of the farmer’s market McIntosh apples I bought earlier,
because our window of opportunity for apple picking seems to be closing and I
didn’t want to miss out. I could have described
the meatballs in red sauce—gravy if you prefer, bubbling away on the stove, the aroma of fennel, garlic and basil, conjuring up a long simmering, early autumn Sunday, reappearing as leftovers on a weekday afternoon.
I could have told you about my memory of the cinnamon
and butter scent that wafted through the house when I made a newly
discovered recipe for apple shortbread bars for the senior breakfast this past Monday—or
my last green tomato hanging on the vine, blushing with orange tints as it struggles to ripen before the first frost. . . as
they say, the list goes on and on.
This exercise taught me two lessons. There is always a topic out there, and, “Write what you know,” works well, but “Write what you love,” tastes, I mean, works better.
What do you write about when you get stuck?
Happy weekend all!
