The truth hurts
It’s time to admit the truth.
I haven’t written anything for over two years now.
No novels, novellas, novelettes, not even a novspresso; no short stories or flash fiction or six-word stories; no planning or drafting or brainstorming, no ideas or flashes or smidgens of inspiration; not even a badly worded sentence littered with typos and grammatical errors.
And long gone is any delusion of “I’m taking a break to recharge the old grey matter.”
If it started as that at all, then it hasn’t been the case for a long, long time, and instead is simply:
- I don’t want to write anymore
- A crappy excuse not to write
- Sheer pig-headedness and laziness
- Lack of conviction/confidence
- A dependency on distractions
So how the hell do I climb out of this pit of apathy?
Well, if I didn’t want to write then I wouldn’t write, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing this post. So, we can strike a line through the first item on the list right away! No writing? Fuck. That. Shit. This is my bread and butter, and just because I’ve been eating a lot of crackers and lard instead lately doesn’t mean I should cross the white loaf and tub of Flora off the shopping list. Time to make some sandwiches!
Now the pig-headedness and laziness I can get behind. I’m a stubborn son of a bitch on the best of days and I’m definitely not the most active fella on the planet (in most areas of my life). Sweet Zombie Jebus is there a better feeling than cancelled plans and sitting around doing sod all?? But maybe there’s a way I can use my powers of stubbornness for good rather than evil? If I can force myself into competition with myself…well, one of us has got to win, right? If I can get myself riled up enough to hate the fact I don’t write more than everything else on the list, maybe there’s a chance.
Lack of confidence is an enormous problem for me, and I assume for a hell of a lot of writers. When you spend your life creating ideas and possibilities, it’s inevitable your brain will linger on the negative ones. The more you create, the more you learn to fear the worst. Murphy’s Law at its finest. And linger I do, on fears so mundane they’ll leave you wondering how you function on a daily basis if things so minute worry you, to fears so pant-shittingly terrifying you wonder why Stephen King hasn’t written a novel about them. There’s no way around this but to embrace the fears and use them to propel my writing forward. Absorb the feeling off fear farts and let it guide my hands across the keyboard. I need to write with conviction and tell confidence to take a flying leap.
The final item on my list is probably the worst in terms of kicking my productivity in the nards. After a long day at work it feels like I NEED to vegetate rather than get home and continue working. A popular theory is that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit and if I got down to a decent writing routine sans TV and Internet it would take within less than a month. What the theory fails to mention is that it only takes twenty-one seconds to break a habit and then you have to start all over again.
This is the one I need most help with…how the hell do you guys avoid the rest of the world??