When you've been writing for any amount of time you'll be guaranteed to come up against the 'I have nothing to write' days.
I've got a pretty good pile of ideas that I keep on the go, but even then I experience these days like everyone else where I just can't seem to get the words out in the way I want to get them out.
It's on those days that I'm glad I put in the work long before I sit down to write.
I wrote the brain dump for this essay on May 5th (almost 2 months ago) and before that, I wrote a note last August that inspired the idea for this essay.
When you commit to building a library of knowledge as a creator, the work starts long before you sit down to write.
The work starts when I open myself up to the sparks of inspiration & ideas. I'm always capturing sparks from what I read & consume and capturing these ready for my sacred time in my writing inbox.
The work starts when I take notes. Each spark note is a prompt for thinking and write more about what I know, or what I'm discovering. They grow to form unique ideas around my knowledge and they start to form the building blocks for all my writing.
The work starts when I invest my time in building a library of knowledge. When I start to connect these atomic notes together I find magic in the intersections and true, unique knowledge starts to form. I can pull together an outline or a whole bunch of text to use in an essay.
And on days like today, when no creative juices are flowing, I'm confident that the work has already been done and before I know it I'm hitting publish.