Filling up an empty white space purely with your selection of words is hard. Fucking hard.
Until you have something to say.
Suddenly, things break loose. You start not caring about the aesthetics, the completeness, the grammars, but only about the core concept that is yet to be verbalized. You are not afraid of the white space anymore. Word by word (definitely not in grammatically-correct order) starts to come out in a stuttering fashion that gradually smooths out, eventually into a flow. The moment you care about puny aesthetics and grammar again, the flow stops right there and you may never get it back that very day.
The folks at Scribe Media named the process perfectly: word vomiting.
Speaking of vomiting, it is like back in the days whenever mom had a huge meal beyond her abdominal capacity, she would go straight to the toilet and stick her pointing finger out to do her throat job. It was never a one-shot job done but rather a “sequence” of fingering her throat until a satisfying lump-sum is visually evident. Nobody interferes during that self-imposed ritual, period. If you want to see the most demonic side of your normally angelic mother, try to open the door during the ritual (Sorry mom..).
My point is that the entire process of word vomiting is quite similar, except that it’s purely a mental exercise without any pointing fingers and body liquids.
By the time you are done word-vomiting, you have a nice word-pizza on a virtual floor that is no longer white.
If you have the guts to dig in and find gold out of the word-pizza of yours, you are the next Paulo Coelho, my friend.
Anyway, I’ve reached an age where I can’t stand not having some of my random thoughts written down somewhere. Tweets are too short; FB and IG are too showy; LinkedIn is too professional. From the fact that I have a stack of old Moleskine notes that were beaten to death that I adored back then but now it is just taking up my bookshelf space, I decided to write somewhere online, which is here.
Let’s see how long this can last.
Happy New Year!
