How to generate ideas- a free-write

The hardest part of being a creative person is constantly coming up with ideas. Sometimes the ideas flow and the well seems full. But not everyday. You write all you're ideas down on you're phone only to one day look at them and none of them really stand out. You have hit a wall. Well what do you do then? Do you try to live some more life until another story appears?  Do you take the day off? Do you do some drugs, hoping that triggers some amount of creativity? No one tells you that when you start out to be a writer, one of you're greatest challenges will be having something to write about. At least no one told me. I mean that is you're job, right? What they tell you about are the long odds that are in front of you to be successful. Every creative has more or less accepted that in my opinion. When you love to create the odds don't matter. You are having so much fun that you would do it for free. You do do it for free. At least at the start. The money is just the icing on the cake. But to not have things to write about, that is something no one sees coming.
As I have set out on this mission to share my writing with the consuming public, I made a promise to myself to write everyday. Yes I thoroughly enjoy writing, it is something I have done for many years now. Up until now I have written only for myself. As a form of self therapy. But now I am writing for Joe Public. At first I am sure it will only be my friends that read my writing but then other people will join the bandwagon and hopefully I will develop some level of a readership. But that means that I have to keep writing. And just how many stories do I have in the bank? Right now I have 10 titles in my phone that I could write about but none of them spoke to me today. No today I don't want to write about my relationships, or the crazy stories from my college days, or a philosophical treatise on the current state of human affairs. Today I just can not be bothered to write anything of real value. So I decided to do a simple freewrite, where I write down my thoughts as I think them as fast as I can. It is not the best way to write a story per se but it is a good way to get some words on paper. Even if those words might not make a lot of sense.

What is a story after all? A story is just a medium. It is a way of delivering a message. The real question is what is the message? The truth is a lot of times I will start a story without knowing what the message will be. But while I am writing it, the message just comes to me. A few years ago I was dating an aspiring writer. She wanted to write a book. I asked her how often she wrote. She said she had been so busy with work that she hadn't written anything for a while. Well now this was a problem. If you want to be a writer, then you have to write! If you have not yet established yourself as a writer, then you have to first do that. Which means you have write. At least a little bit everyday. How else can you call yourself an aspiring writer?

Well I don't want to be a hypocrite. If I am going to set out to be a writer, I will have to write everyday. It might not be the best writing, but it will surely get better over time. But the only way that the writing will get better is if I write. Whether I have an idea or not, I have to write. That is the job of a writer. But now back to my main problem at hand. If I am to be a writer of short stories, then I have to constantly think of new story ideas. Which is a tall task. This year I would like to write 300 stories, so far I have written 12. And I am already starting to hit a wall. This is not good news.

But worry not. Rome was not built in a day. You do not have to do a year's worth of work in one day. Life is lived one day at a time. So what if I do not have anything to write about today? I will start again tomorrow and hopefully one of the ideas in my phone will seem exciting to me. Then I will try to write a story about that.  You can't look too much further out then one day. All you have is today, so write today, and show up tomorrow and then do the same thing. Sooner or later a year will have passed and you will have written 300 stories, if not more. It seems like a tall task sitting here in January but life is lived day by day. We just have to try hard to win the day in front of us.

But the real thing giving me existential angst is what is the trajectory of my new found blog? Do I want to bring back the characters from my earlier stories and see how they grow? Do I want to write about every date I've ever been on? At some point I will run out of relationship/date stories, that I know. Do I want to write about stories that I have heard but have not been a part of? What are the messages that I am trying to put out into the world? These are all questions that I will have to answer with time but I am hoping that as I continue to write everyday the answers will become clearer to me. We will resume this journey tomorrow as today's story has somehow been written right under my nose. The message has become clear.

Write everyday, no matter what.