Writing in the Rain

Everyone has got their muse. Mine just happens to be the rain. 

 

 

 

I don't know how this really started. I just know that one day I convinced myself that all the best things I'd ever written happened on rainy days. 

Over time, I have come to rely on it for that; that when the rain comes, the scene will get written, the chapter completed, writer's-block beaten. 

 

Occasionally something good will come to me on a sunny day, but it takes a dedicated kind of focus and a calmness of the mind to bring me there. That being said, all my sunny-day-scenes tend to feel more peaceful, sometimes sad. Rarely are they of the same kind of impact or vitality as the things I write when it rains. 

 

Writing in the rain has its upsides and its downsides. It's both erratic, and reliable. 

When it doesn't rain for weeks on end, I feel as desperate for it as the earth around me. I feel parched, dried up in my creativity, like the thirsty plant shrivels. 

And yet, when the clouds come over me, I know that today I may write again. It always rains eventually, and when the drought ends, so does my writer's block. 

 

Over the years, the metaphor has only become more perfect. How sporadic rain can be. Just like inspiration, it sometimes comes when you least expect it, or don't want it at all; when you have prior engagements and you have to chose to either duck-out and feel guilty for missing life, or miss out and feel regret for the words that might have been written. Inspiration waits for no one. And the storms don't plan their schedule around me.

And so, I plan around it, when I can. I look at the weather forecast and make excuses on days when I want to slip away; do nothing but listen to the tap of the rain on my window and the click of my quick fingers typing, nothing but cross empty pages, showering them with curled letters, little dotted words that drizzle and then drench into paragraphs.

Ah, yes: the rain, it comes like a river. 

But then there was a day this summer when it rained so much, buckets filled and spewed over, saplings drowned, every dirty window for miles was washed clean, and all I could do was sit and look, and watch the rain fall. I don't think I wrote more than a page that day. 

 

 

 

 

I don't know what the lesson here is, other than that maybe there's a balance to everything. Just like words don't always come when it rains; just like how, a few weeks after that rainy day on which nothing was written, I wrote the best scene I'd written all summer on a hot humid day; in the same way that long busy winters always give way to rich and rain-full summers in which so much is written, writing comes with ups and downs. 

Rain and sun, inspiration, depression. Sometimes it rains, and words fall like a waterfall. Sometimes there are other things to do, like to sit and simply watch the rain fall. 

 

When it comes down to it, I'm a writer on rainy days and on sunny ones; I'm a writer in winter, and in summer, whether I'm writing or not. 

For all of these things are part of it, you write, and you live, and then sometimes you write some more. And occasionally, all it takes to be a writer is to sit and listen to the rain fall and let your keyboard be still.