Well, its reality has arrived. I struggle to find something to write about. I know there are a bevy of topics just waiting to be explored, yet I’d rather sit in a stupor looking at a blank page.

When I teach students, I will often direct them to pull out a piece of paper or today, open their laptop and just start writing anything at all, until something hits and you find yourself traveling down a road of story-telling. I give them the option to use the phrase, “I can’t think of anything” over and over until they get bored with it start to write anything that comes to mind. In twenty five years of using this method in the classroom, I have one student give me a page – before laptops – and front and back, like a penance in the old tradition of detention, he wrote the phrase from beginning to end. I looked at it when he put it on the pile because in his early musings, I suspected that might be the case, and then I chuckled. I looked at him, and we both had a laugh because I liked this guy, as I do of course the majority of my students otherwise I would be in the wrong profession. I said to him, do you know this probably took more effort than you would have simply free-wrote on any topic coming to mind. He looked at me with a smile, and agreed and said it was one of the most tedious exercises he had experienced in a writing project.

I can’t think of anything.