The caption she kept not writing

A woman in Mohandessin sews dresses at home and has decided to sell them. The photographs are done. The dress hangs well in the light from the balcony. The box under the picture, where the words go, has been empty for three days.

She is not short of things to say. She knows why the fabric was chosen, who the cut flatters, how it washes. What she is short of is permission to say it badly.

That is what the empty box usually is. Not a lack of ideas, but a refusal to put down a first version that will not be good enough. So nothing goes down, and nothing is the one version that can never be improved.

The way through is almost embarrassingly plain. Put down a line, any line. Read it, and make it a little better. Put another line under it. Fix that one. Keep going until there is something that could stand under the photograph, and then let it stand there.

Then do the same tomorrow, for the next dress.

The early attempts will be clumsy, and some of them will go up clumsy. But the clumsy ones are where the good ones come from. Somewhere around the twentieth caption she will notice that she now knows what she thinks about her own dresses, in a way she did not before she had to put it into words. Writing does that. It does not only record a point of view; it builds one.

None of that starts with the right sentence. It starts with a wrong one, typed into an empty box and left there long enough to be fixed.