Sometimes writing is dull. No, not just dull. Deadly boring.

I stare at myself in the mirror, noting the bags under my eyes, mind fuzzy from lack of a good night’s sleep. I snort at my own bedraggled appearance. The mediocre is strong in this one.

Our writer brains yearn for new vistas, for inspiration and a sense of wonder, but sometimes all we can manage is a couple of idiots plodding through a forest, exchanging inane dialogue and waiting for something – anything – interesting to happen.

I’ve caught myself writing a scene like that and thinking I wrote almost this exact same one in that other book. Why can’t I find something fresh to write about?

Maybe my reading circle is too small to find new inspiration. Maybe my brain is just tired from lack of sleep and four years of non-stop worrying.

Maybe, my inner critic whispers, there is nothing fresh and new because it has ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN.

All of us live in our own quiet silos, walled off from the rest of humanity bu the walls around us, waiting for this pandemic to end. This enforced loneliness stunts us, cramps our social reflexes, dulls our curious minds, while we feed ourselves from never-ending streams of TV pablum and junk food delivered to us (if we’re lucky) by others who have taken so much of the risk of these perilous times on themselves for our benefit.

In the mornings, I get up early to dutifully stare at the screen, ready to plow ahead, hoping for inspiration to strike. Striving to put myself into the story, to find that spark that will drive it.

And all too often I come up empty.

Then one morning, I get up after a rough night’s non-sleep. Nothing much has changed. The pandemic churns on outside, and inside our little world is the same today as it was yesterday.

But something has shifted.

I sit down at the keyboard, and it’s like I’m on fire. The words suddenly flow because amen hallelujah the writing muse has decided to smile on me today. My sense of wonder, of beauty, has returned like a sense of once taste dulled by covid, now restored in all its brilliance. I can smell the flowers in that forest, hear the rush of wind through the fluttering leaves. And I can feel the deep and ancient danger that approaches like the rumble of an earthquake, though my characters don’t know it yet.

Just like that, I’m writing again.

Late that night, I collapse in bed, still stung by the wonderful weirdness of it all, thinking if someone could bottle that lightning, that thing that makes it all click, I would give my soul for it.

Drenched in the wonder once again.

Then I drift off, at last, into sleep.