The Nineteenth Century English painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, once said, “It is vain for painters to endeavor to invent without materials with which the mind may work.”

Easy for a painter to say, painters have hundreds of tools: brushes, paints, canvases, knives, colors in the millions, papers; any old board.

But writers? What do we have? a measly pen? A computer? A typewriter?, a lined, A paper tablet? Nothing like painters, right?

Measly? Not.

Our tools are manifest in every book we read, in every conversation we overhear, every blade of grass we see, every cloud, every character, phrase or scene. We writers’ tools are, I think, unlimited.

But that unlimitedness can trip us with our profoundest dilemma: we have to choose. But how? What do we limit? How do we cull and focus in order to start filling the blank screen or the empty page?

I think that blank page gives us our greatest tool of all: the first word. The first word is huge because it gives us our next tool: the second word. And that word gives us the next until our overflowing toolkit provides everything we need to carve out a story, a poem, a manual, or even a letter. It’s amazing what we’ve got.