They sip coffee.
They rearrange notebooks.
They clean their house.

The surprise isn’t that waiting kills the work.

It’s that writing starts the moment you stop asking time for permission

It starts when you pick up the pen and write

Good writing isn’t born from big events.

It comes from noticing the small, human bits everyone else rushes past.

The words you’re missing are already here

You just didn’t stop long enough to see it.

|https://wordsinmotion.substack.com/subscribe

It took weeks to notice what had changed.

The shoreline wasn’t the same anymore.

Not because the lake had shifted,
but because I had been moving the whole time,
even on the days it felt like I wasn’t going anywhere at all.

I showed up anyway.
Pushed off.
Pulled once. Then again.

Some days the lake gave me light.
Some days it gave me nothing but sore arms and the sound of my own breathing.

Every morning, the canoe waited where I left it, nosed into the reeds like it hadn’t moved an inch.

Same paddle.
Same water.
Same quiet that felt almost disappointing.

So I stopped editing mid-thought and kept walking.

That’s when I noticed the plaque bolted into the railing—small, easy to miss:

This bridge was built after the first one failed

It held, whether my thoughts were elegant or sloppy.

One morning, halfway across, I realized something unsettling:
the sentence I’d been revising wasn’t a story at all.

It was an apology.
To myself.
For waiting until I “got it right” to move forward.

The bridge didn’t care.

I crossed the bridge every morning with a sentence half-written in my head.
I’d revise it with each step—tighten here, soften there—until it almost felt true.

.

If I may......