inspiration

Someone I knew wrote an “inspirational message” on their whiteboard: “Just Be Stronger.” I have a hard time not writing a response to that on their whiteboard, but first, I need to process the concept.

It makes me angry, really. Not the sentiment itself – that actually makes me really sad for him, because I know why he wrote it. He wrote it out of a sense of desperation, of needing to be stronger, but not knowing exactly how.

So who am I angry at? (Or, more properly, “At whom am I angry?” — I am a writer, you know!)

I’m angry at a lot of things. In the end, the truth is, I’m angry at God.

I’m angry at God on behalf of this person who needs an answer to what he sees as an internal weakness. I’m angry at God on my own behalf, because I have my own need for answers, for help, for succor, and I don’t know from where such aid will come.

“Succor” means “relief, or aid.” It’s probably obvious in context, just in case you don’t know what the word means. I don’t think I should use the word, really, but I’m trying not to edit what I write as part of the “500 words challenge.”

Maybe it’s selfish to assume that everyone should have a helping hand available when they really need it. To me, it’s part of the social contract: you provide aid to those who need, and the implied reward is that when you need it, aid will be there for you, if it’s doable.

This isn’t a sort of cry for help that says “Hey, Santa, give me a Mercedes.” It’s a wail – a cry that says “Someone, give me shelter from this storm.” Shelter can be easy, even if the storm is allegorical. Shelter is something you can provide by coming alongside someone, by empathizing with them, by letting them know they’re not alone, by reaching out.

And thus: I’m angry at God. He created this world; He created this person who is now crying for His help more than mine. God’s got to be infinitely better at helping him than I could ever imagine being – why does He, in his knowledge and wisdom, leave this poor fellow spinning in the wind, despite his cries for help?

Why does He leave it to us, poor and broken instruments of His Will even at our best?

If I was going to write a response to “Just be stronger,” I think I’d write: “You can be stronger. Even better, we can be stronger together than we can ever be when we are apart. I understand. I am with you in the well. You are not alone, and you will never be alone, no matter how alone you might feel right now. I will always be there with you, and I will do my best to carry you when you struggle. You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone.”

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

When I get on a tear, 500 words is nothing – I tend to write more than that per day anyway, on various things and to various people. The challenge there is “getting on a tear.” When I’m writing, I usually have something to say (that’s why I’m writing, right?) and I tend to try to say it. That means that for this entry, I’ve already said what I felt I needed to say:

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

Since I’ve already said what I wanted to have said for this post, everything else is a grind – I’m basically rehashing what I’ve already said, expanding, fleshing out. It’s like writing an Amplified Bible or something, where every word has alternate meanings or synonyms – writing by thesaurus.

It goes against most of the habits I’ve tried to develop, habits against chasing rabbits for the sake of chasing rabbits.

I don’t mind the freedom to go into more depth, to be sure – in some ways, I find writing for the web constrictive, because I don’t think very simply in the first place. So my natural writing style would be fluid and verbose, as I describe a pattern, then try to click it into place around a theme to make a point.

But the web doesn’t work that way; people scan, they don’t look for patterns. So for the web, I write more directly, I try to pull out the themes and points, and use that instead of my natural form of communication or description.

So what happens here is that I start with my thesis statement – my theme – and work from there as usual, and I try to flesh it out as if someone were to be interested in it (also as usual), and then… I find myself running out of steam around 400 words. Every time. I’m at … this is word 370, and I am now reaching.

The other side of the challenge is the duration not of the writing, but the challenge itself. Thirty-one days, straight, is a lot. I could see “every weekday for a month” as being a lot easier, honestly, because you’d have the downtime of knowing you had those days off to recharge or observe, to build something that could be written about.

But the nature of the challenge is to avoid that. The nature of the challenge to me is that I honestly want to try to publish every day – here – in addition to whatever else I may write. (I’ve published at least five other things during the time I’ve been on the challenge so far, on other sites.) But I want to build traffic up here, too, and part of that is having content.

Hopefully I’ll succeed at the challenge – and hopefully I’ll see more traffic, too.

Just be stronger?

I’m grinding out words already.