The Rose

Ad-Lib

Author’s Gab, Reader Talk.

A letter to you, the reader, so that you can finally figure out what I’m thinking.

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This Month: You could write a poem about that!

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“Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.”

— Richard Hugo, from his essay collection “The Triggering Town”

Dear Reader,

You know, it’s summer and there’s a stack of things I have to write about, but haven’t. And, because I have been procrastinating again, or just overwhelmingly busy with making major life decisions, this AD-Lib is going to count for two months instead of one. But, this has gotten me thinking: sometimes, it’s not what you are writing about, but what you aren’t that matters. It’s a pretty basic principle of writing, and one we can all agree on. You can absolutely write about anything and everything you choose to write about. But, by picking a topic, there’s a topic you aren’t choosing. And, that’s what I want to talk about today: all the stuff you aren’t choosing to write about.

Because, there’s probably more things you aren’t choosing to write about than things you are. If you choose one topic, there’s certainly at least 10 others you haven’t chosen. I, for one, haven’t chosen to write about the current crochet project I’m working on; and, I haven’t chosen to write about my Oma’s sewing table I used to quilt with in the basement, which still smells like her years later. I haven’t even gotten meta and written about writing an AD-Lib!

It’s that limitless potential of topics that makes writing fun, right? Like having a buffet style dinner right in front of you, you can always say: “I want some of that, some of that, and some of that…” And, you then think to yourself, as you’re taking from this writing idea buffet, “Hm, maybe I should write a poem about that?”

But friends, fellow writers, even if you aren’t currently writing a poem about that, or maybe you think to yourself you don’t want to or you shouldn’t, I’m here to tell you, you can write a poem about that! This is important, right, so we don’t become complacent in our writing. We constantly need to stretch ourselves and take feedback from our peers, but we also need to reach for the poems and the prose and the other writing we aren’t reaching for, the stuff that’s sitting right in front of us we haven’t “eaten” yet.

Who will we indeed become if we just wrote about that one thing we haven’t written about yet? Or the ten things we haven’t penned? Are we afraid to embrace them or just haven’t thought they weren’t worth the effort?

When I went to writing group in May, poet Isabella J. Mansfield criticized herself and all of us poets for not writing about the things that were right in front of us to write about. She said really, the bane of it was the things she wasn’t writing and not the things she was. And then, as we went around the circle and each poet talked about something they had done that they hadn’t written about, she lamented each time, “You could write a poem about that!” Then, she suggested we each write a poem about the fact we could write a poem about anything. It wasn’t a bad idea.

So, what do we do? Maybe it’s best to avoid writing about something you don’t know about without researching it and spending time with the topic first. But, maybe you do have some ideas of things you haven’t written about lodged up there in that brain of yours. What then?

“Perhaps you already have a potential idea or two – but you’re holding back. You might feel that you’re not “ready” to tackle a particular idea, but what’s the worst that could happen if you give it a go? Your idea won’t be wasted. Even if you can’t fully do it justice immediately, spending some time exploring it could put you in a better position in the months or years to come.

“If you’ve got some half-formed ideas, set aside some focused time to explore them – maybe in your favourite coffee shop. You might find that you come up with a new angle or development that really interests you. Or you might end up going in a whole new direction, sparked by something incidental in the piece that you create.”

— Aliventures, from “How to Choose and Develop a Writing Idea [With Examples]”

After that, the sky’s the limit, right? Richard Hugo, in his essay collection, “The Triggering Town”, wrote about how, even when you chose a topic, that topic may not reflect the actual topic the piece produces. I know this firsthand, because I read a poem aloud the other day I wrote for my opa called, “The Chess Game”, which is about him and his father playing chess. When I finished, someone commented it reflected the modern day political situation. I responded quickly that it was not how I intended it, but it could be interpreted that way. The end result, therefore, may well be both: the intended topic and the interpretation.

But, to get caught up in that misses the point. Because, if you get stuck with writers block or indecision, you are absolutely going nowhere anyway. And, there’s still something, even in choosing a topic, that eliminates all those other topics you didn’t want to write about. So, how do we not get hung up here? Or, just not feel guilty about all the stuff we have not written?

I feel like Nina McConigley, in her article, “Sometimes a Fish, Sometimes a Story” has a good answer for us:

“It wasn’t that trying to have a baby was hell to me that summer; I had lost all pep for creating anything. Often, I looked at a blank screen and closed my computer. Maybe I don’t have anything left to say, I thought. My novel sat untouched for months. I fretted and instead immersed myself more in teaching… But, that morning, I took a notebook and sat on the porch and thought of a moment in my life. And, what I thought of was the story of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding. Something I hadn’t though about for years. I wrote about the day. How excited we were about the teacher in space and the memory of my teacher wheeling the TV out of our classroom after the explosion. I wrote and wrote — and suddenly, I knew this would be the beginning of my novel… I often think of writing like a body of water: still on the surface, and when we write, we reach below the surface, deep into our unconscious, and bring something forth. Sometimes a fish, sometimes a story.”

— Nina McConigley, taken from her article, “Sometimes a Fish, Sometimes a Story”, which appeared in the March/April 2026 edition of Poets and Writers magazine

I’ll add to this and say that, as much as it is important to reach beneath the surface, it’s also important to forgive yourself. Even if you are not writing about something and feel like you should, this is not an end all. I have faith in you guys that you will bring all those things you haven’t written about, consciously or unconsciously, to the “written about” pile, if you feel there is potential for them to be written.

Or, as one Reddit user said:

Comment
by from discussion
inWritingHub

So, keep reaching. Write a poem about that one thing you haven’t written about today. Maybe it will become something more than you intended it to be, maybe it won’t. The important thing is to allow that topic to get out of your brain, out of the list of things right in front of you that you haven’t written about yet (but could!), in order to be penned and reach its full potential. Because, if you don’t, it never will.

Think about that. ~

Sincerely, your writer,

Jessica A. McLean

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Recent Happenings:

• Recent Ad-Lib Activity:
  • The June/July 2026 Ad Lib is here!
    • TBA: I’m working on finishing my series on form. Stay tuned.
• Recently Published:
  • Poems Added:
    • “How to write a semi-perfect sonnet”, a sample semi-perfect sonnet
    • “When you see a spider,”, a reverse etheree
• Prose I’m working on in the background:
  • I’m continuing to work on my novel, thus far entitled, “Conrad and His Brothers”, which is a historical fiction and fantasy adaption of the fairy tale, “Boots and His Brothers”. Most recently, I’m working on developing the character, Henrick Mueller, a bank manger in Basel, Switzerland who had an affair with a wealthy noblewoman, which caused him to embezzle bank funds to court her. Does he receive justice? Is the rehab job he is working in Munich for his financier friend and paying down his debt enough punishment? How does this affect the greater plot? Stay tuned!
  • I’m developing a character for a potential short story named Finn Ardent, a sawyer at a Maine sawmill, who is currently on strike in an effort to unionize his company. I actually got the idea from a dream I had, literally woke up and created him. But, I like his arc and trajectory so far. It actually made me cry. TBA if we will see him appear in the future!
• Editing, editing, and more editing.
• Waiting

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