Listening as a Creative Act

For years I treated writing like a negotiation I had to win. Show up, wrestle the blank page into submission, extract the words. Some days it worked. Most days it left both of us bruised.

What I’ve been practicing instead is something closer to listening. Sitting down without an agenda and asking the day what it actually wants to say — which is usually quieter and stranger than what I’d planned to make it say.

This sounds soft. It isn’t. Listening takes more nerve than forcing, because you have to tolerate not knowing where the thing is going. The forcing was never about the work anyway. It was about the fear underneath it.

The work already knows what it wants to be. My job is to stop interrupting.

So the practice, for now: show up, shut up, write down what I hear. Befriend the silence when nothing comes. It comes back around when it’s ready. It always has.