Ideas Everywhere…Words Nowhere.

A Non-starter Writers Notes — Day4. posted day5

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By Day One of Write a Page a Day, I had written zero words and exhausted myself completely.

This felt like an accomplishment. Ideas arrived in mobs, loud and poorly coordinated. One wanted me to build a professional persona—clean, credible, safely impressive. Another wanted me to write stories recklessly, preferably ones involving ghosts, guilt, and unresolved childhoods. Then there was the clinic, Project ViVa, unpaid emails, and the persistent sense that everything important in my life had decided to speak at once. I spent the day thinking about writing, which is far more tiring than writing.

Day Two arrived with the same word count: ZERO. Capital letters felt earned. Still, ambition made a brief appearance. I decided I would write 2,000 words a day and produce a novel, NaNoWriMo-style—minus the optimism, community, or likelihood of completion. The stories multiplied in protest. Each insisted it should go first. The effort of choosing one exhausted me, so I chose none. Resistance, dressed up as strategy, won again.

Day Three surprised me. I still avoided real commitment, but I made a collage of all the stories demanding attention, pasted together like a vision board for a life I was actively avoiding. Then I let one story step forward—politely, without shouting—and used the blank-page technique I’d learned at a Himalayan writing retreat. It involved silence, breathing, and pretending fear was optional.

I wrote 500 words.

This was both underwhelming and miraculous. I also discovered, with mild disbelief, that 500 words make a page. One page felt humane. Two thousand felt punitive. So I negotiated with myself: until I was emotionally stable enough for ambition, I would settle for ritual. One page a day. No heroics.

This is where my bad habits intervened. I reuse paper. Not from ecological virtue, but convenience and denial. I write client notes, blog drafts, grocery lists, and existential distress on the same sheets. While sifting through this paper archaeology, I found something unsettling—a piece of writing that looked suspiciously like the beginning of a novel.

It came from a forgotten prompt, possibly from BlogAdda or Indiblogger, about the number three. The first number that implies a collective. Things that arrive in threes. Beginning, middle, end. Birth, life, death. Tea, biscuit, regret.

The character was Akshar. Or Ashkara. I hadn’t committed. He was to be the vehicle for the next twenty-eight days, whether he consented or not. He was contemplating the number three at work when his colleague Sarah interrupted him.

Sarah was into pop psychology, healing spirituality, and whatever the internet recommended that week.

“Know something?” she asked.

Akshar hated this question.

“Know what?” he replied, already tired.

“I was thinking about that thing you said. About three. Old kings, fiddlers, that sort of thing.”

Akshar briefly wondered if Sarah was the inspiration for Hermione, then decided this was unkind—to Hermione.

“Three appears everywhere,” Sarah continued. “Philosophical systems. Symbols. Gasser Khan. The Tamga of Tamerlane. Coats of arms. Samarkand. Ethiopia. Mongolia. Buddhist banners—”

“Thank you, sweetie,” Akshar cut in. “I’ll just Google ‘triad’ like a functioning adult.”

“Maybe,” said Nagesh, appearing at exactly the wrong moment, “you need to triage.”

Akshar looked at the two of them and thought: So this is how novels begin. Poorly. On recycled paper.