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Often I wake up with a highly charged image or phrase or snatch of song in my mind. If I am smart, I will scribble it down on the notepad by my bed; otherwise, it is likely to vanish with the morning dew. Sometimes it lodges in the mind like a grain of sand in an oyster or comes around later it the day like a creditor pursuing a bad debt. I will sit in my study with the morning's gleanings, looking for the germ of an idea. Sometimes the meaning is clear; often not. It is best at such times to allow the imagination to wander where it will, tethered to its starting point by the slenderest of threads, or perhaps not at all. Memory may come into play at this point: a childhood experience, a scene from a movie or a novel or an old TV show, a passage in Scripture. Often I find myself in unfamiliar terrain and must do research. Eventually I find myself back where I began, putting words to paper.
What if the words don't come? Many notable writers have struggled with writer's block; some have been done in by it. George Gilder put this down to a lack of faith; I think it's more an issue of putting your faith in the wrong place. You fall into the trap of thinking you are the author of the words that flow from your pen -- or don't flow, as the case may be. "Man has never lacked for words," wrote Henry Miller, who was nearly crippled by writer's block early in his career. "The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding."
So where do the words come from? The Hebrew people were fed for 40 years with manna that they found each morning lying like dew upon the ground. They had to gather it up before the sun grew hot; otherwise, it would melt. If they left any to the next day or tried to hoard it, the manna would spoil. They were instructed to gather a double portion on the morning before the Sabbath, and this would keep until the day following. With no other source of supply, Moses must have worried from time to time about where their next meal would come from if anything should happen. But they really only needed that one source: this was bread from heaven.
Exodus 16
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