Inevitably, after the assignment had been described with as much intention and story as possible, after a small spark of curiosity has finally begun to glow in the room amongst the students, a hand goes up – Liam. Jesus Almighty! The question lands like cold water in the crotch.
How many words. How many pages.
In that moment, the invitation to think, to feel, to wrestle with something real collapses into a set of measurements. Not a conversation. Not discovery. Just requirements. Every. Damn. Time.
Discovery through writing has never been about word counts. It has never been about minimum or maximum lengths. Hell, it is not even about grammar, syntax, or the cleanest turn of a phrase. Writing is the practice of staying. Writing is remaining in the chair while the world keeps spinning, choosing to study whatever the last swirl left behind. No prescribed number of words will ever manufacture meaning in a soul unwilling to face what hurts long enough to understand it.
Writing is salt in the wound. It burns. It draws out what has been hiding. The good. The bad. The unspeakable. It makes the environment less friendly for the slow rot of memory and the quiet infection of trauma. The work is to sift through the mess and keep asking the questions that insist on being asked. What happened? How did it unfold? Where did it mark the body, the heart, the mind? Who stood inside that moment, and how might I be slowly forming because of it.
The work is not pretty. The work is excavation. Writing is digging through memory, through failure, through rage, through grief, and asking questions that do not care about comfort nor wish to answer the question of who left the scar or cut the bone.
Sometimes the words slam the door on repetition. Sometimes repetition of the same word is the only victory. A thin, trembling layer of a word laid across chaos to create order just long enough to hear a whisper calling from underneath the shit. No healing. No closure. Just enough clarity to understand a moment or a thousand without continuing to lie it is all going to be okay.
Sometimes the words keeps the moment from returning. Sometimes the words reveal that the moment will return again and again. But sometimes this means 200 words on the back of scratch paper, other times it means two years of journaling daily. Pages cannot measure that. Word counts cannot measure that. This is not the filling of space. This is the uncovering of something quieter, something that only surfaces when a I stay long enough for the truth to step forward.
And the part my students never could stomach and took me years to learn. The words and the story will not fix the past, repair the fracture, or reconcile anything that has been lost. The story simply refuses to look away like some fucked up carnival mirror bearing witness to the pain just to know it happened. There is a violence in that kind of honesty. A necessary violence. A ripping away of the polite fabric that keeps everyone smiling while they bleed out of sight. Writing does not draw the curtain, rather it pulls it down and throws it on the floor and forces the scene to stand there naked in the dark. And write enough, and a candle may be lit to see there needs to be more work done! Because the page keeps its own ledger. The page knows when it is lied to. The page knows when the writer flinched and pulled back and dressed the truth up to make it digestible. The page waits. The page holds the line until the writer returns with something real enough to remove the fig leaves and know this is holy ground.
And so, Liam, I cannot tell you how many words it will require. I can tell you that if you do not write the alternative is rot. The alternative is silence, and silence is where the worst lies grow strong. Writing is the refusal to feed them. That is the assignment. That is the cost. That is the only way any of it matters.
But, let’s start with 500 words. Daily. Prompt in hand. And try to make a connection after every month and theme. Sound good?
Muddled Soma 