The Quest for the Right Materials

Photo by Imagine Buddy on Unsplash

Some writers crave inspiration while staring at a blank page; I need the right materials to start writing.

As a freelancer, I don’t have much control over my schedule. This week, however, the extreme heat wave coincided with a lighter workload. I thought I'd use the opportunity to write new essays or keep developing script ideas, but I couldn’t. My mind felt sluggish. Sleep deprivation from the heat made writing a simple email an odyssey. So instead of grinding to the point of neurosis, I put writing aside and tried to find more suitable activities for my mind.

I pulled out a box of a 3D puzzle I bought earlier this year, thinking I would build it once I was stable enough at work to have hobbies — that moment would do. The instructions said it takes about 4 hours to assemble, so it sounded like a good way to spend an afternoon.

I liked assembling things long before I became a writer. Growing up, I could spend entire days building towers and monuments from construction sets. Working with my hands quieted a part of my brain that writing never could. For an hour, clipping those wooden pieces together brought that feeling back.

I’m not going to lie, I felt a bit frustrated in the moment. I checked the instructions to make sure there weren’t any missing pages or pieces that had slipped off my desk. Nope, that was it. But past that initial surprise, I quickly started to feel something more fulfilling — completion.

During that brief hour spent building this model, there was no stress. No clients, no editors, no pitches, and no waiting. Just pieces scattered on the table, waiting for me to pick them up and stick them together. Piece A fits piece B, and so on.

And as I lifted up the completed product for final inspection, I started to understand that this entire afternoon — the scattered pieces, the construction, the completion — is exactly what draws me to writing.

Building Before Imagining

There’s a misconception about writing that what writers need most is inspiration — an idea, a concept, or a story to put into words without thinking. We all have this image of a struggling writer, mind brimming with ideas, staring at a blank page because they fear the story won’t be as good on the page as it is in their head. What they fear is the execution.

I'm wired differently. Ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They come as fragments—scenes, questions, images that don't yet belong together. I outline obsessively because I'm searching for the underlying structure. Once I find it, writing stops feeling intimidating and starts feeling inevitable. That's the part I love: not inventing from nothing, but building from something.

In that sense, writing is exactly like construction for me. If you put me in the middle of an empty field and ask me to imagine what I could build in there, I can’t think of anything. But when I look at a pile of material, I immediately want to figure out what it wants to become.

Every Writer Needs Different Materials

I light up when the work involves making something from something else. My best writing experiences were when I pitched ideas, argued them out, and refined a script with a creative team until it clicked into something the client actually needed. The excitement wasn't in coming up with the idea. It was watching an ordinary idea become inevitable after enough revision.

Some writers thrive on the opposite: a blank page, a stray image, a line of dialogue that arrives uninvited. They build from nothing, and I admire them for that. I need to build from something. I can barely get a word out of a premise. But once I finally figure out the bones of a structure, I can't stop pulling at the thread.

So when I get stuck, the question I used to ask was: "Why don't I have enough ideas?"

The better question, I've learned, is: "What kind of material lets me build?"

Craft Over Inspiration

For many years, I kept wondering how I could consider myself a writer if I couldn’t come up with a dozen concepts on the spot before breakfast. I’d watch many of my peers produce a dozen pieces a month, going at full speed while I was painstakingly trying to come up with a story that would hold up. Now I think I realize there are many ways to be a writer.

Mine is about building with words. Whether the raw materials are scenes, search intents, interviews, footage, or commercial briefs is secondary. I’d rather take one promising concept and transform it into something meaningful, coherent, and resonant for as long as I can.

What matters is the opportunity to look at scattered pieces and make them click together until they form something that wasn’t visible before.

Maybe that's what writing has always been for me. Not waiting for inspiration to arrive, but recognizing the right pieces when they land on the table — and patiently fitting them together until something solid stands where there was once only a pile of parts. Maybe that's why I've always enjoyed collaborative work more than many other writers do. Every assignment begins with materials.