Thursday, June 13, 2013

Writer's Bane (or "Not Writing")

Here I sit at my desk, surfing Facebook while cooking stir-fry and doing laundry. And writing. Well, writing about not writing. I have an email starred in my inbox labeled "How to write whether you feel like it or not." I read it once, then marked it as something to come back to later...that was about a month ago.

If you look online you'll find the majority of articles on writing are about overcoming the myth of "writer's block" (aka procrastination), each of them claiming to hold the secret to jump starting your writing career (each one written in the same self-help format that I rarely find helpful). Of course, in the end they all come back to the same fool-proof principle: Just write. So that is what I am doing. Writing about not writing.

Sometimes I write because I have to. Because it is the only thing that will keep my mind from descending into insanity. Some of my better blog posts have come out of these journaling sessions. But sometimes I write because I have a story to share. Those are the hard kind to write. They take time, lots of time, to get them just right. And writing them is a lonely endeavor.

And then there's the fact that I'm still figuring out my writing process (writing a story is not quite as linear as you would expect).

If only I could convince myself to write short stories (something more fit to my level of patience). But, no. I want write novels. And not just one novel--a whole series of them. Maybe even a series of series. A trilogy here, a heptalogy there...

How is it that last year I was able to write a novella in a month and now I can't seem to write anything? Last year I wrote during NaNoWriMo. There were deadlines. There was community. There was craziness and I was out of my mind (and the dishes piled up).

And, so, instead of writing, I am "not writing." I could go on, but I will end lest my "not writing" become excessively long, and you become excessively bored and never read anything I write (or don't write) ever again for fear of boredom.

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