Why Is Writing So Hard?
I shouldn’t say writing is hard but staying motivated is.
In the last month, I think I might have completed one chapter of my novel. I’ve had absolutely 0 new ideas. Well, let me roll that back a bit, I’ve had 0 new ideas for the novel I’m currently working on. Ideas for new works have been free flowing. Currently, I have about seven different stories written down in my outline book. My marble old school composition book is my Holy Grail. It holds all my ideas and God help me if I ever lose it because there goes everything. Hey, I never said I was smart.
I have tons of reasons, call them excuses, for why I haven’t sat down to write.
The first one, my youngest children, my boys start Kindergarten this fall and this is my last month with my babies. Next week, they’ll start school and no longer will I be able to call them babies, they will officially be kids and I feel some type of way about that. I internalize everything and because of that, my brain fogs over under the stress and with it go my ideas.
The second excuse, I just didn’t feel like it. I did other things, like reading and research. Reading is always good, especially when your mentor gives you a list of books to read that might help you on the journey to becoming a better writer. I also created this blog as a way to write something when I’m drawing a blank for the novel. A lot of good it’s served because I haven’t written anything new here either.
My third and last excuse is a combination of wedding and vacation planning, which is the only one of the three that I would actually consider legitimate. To my workaholic self, I still say no excuse is good enough. I should have written something.
Last night the muse finally hit me. I think it happened because I stopped beating myself up about the fact that I wasn’t working on my project. Ideas seemed to flow as easily as they had when I first sat down to start Parking Lot nearly six months ago. That’s reassuring to me as it proves that I’m not a hack and I might be able to actually pull this off. I can dream.
Just in case, you were wondering about all my new ideas here’s one of them because I’m a broken fridge.
The first tidbit of All Inclusive.
“The beach stretched on for miles. Waves lapped the shore. It’s beauty, transcendent. Elevating her soul to places it had no right to go at such a young age.”
There you go. That little bit woke me up out of a dead sleep and I had to write it down, then I went back to bed. It will fit in well as a good beginning to that story which will probably be a short fiction piece that I’ll use for a contest when I get around to writing it.
Now back to the keyboard and Parking Lot and you get back to writing. Your time of procrastination has ended.
