Interruptions to Your Writing
Most authors have heard that they should ‘write every day’.I don’t always manage to do it, and sometimes when I do write, it isn’t on mycurrent Work in Progress. I might have a blog post coming due, so I write that.Or I work on a piece for an upcoming newsletter. Typically, these ‘also wrote’items are not very long, and adding them to my Writing Journal doesn’t make mystats look any good. But it is writing, and so I count it.
But sometimes, something comes along that knocks you rightout of the idea of writing. It might last a couple of days, a couple months, oreven longer. For instance, last year when my right arm was broken in a caraccident, I could not write longhand nor by keyboard for at least 6 weeks. Eventhen, I had to have weeks of physical therapy to get that arm used to doingthings again. But I remember plotting out several scenes in my head while myhand was otherwise occupied, and as soon as I could type again, those scenesflowed out of me easily.
Another example: My hubby was facing surgery this pastMonday. All surgery has its risks. Neither one of us got anything productivedone that Saturday and Sunday. I couldn’t even focus enough to plot upcomingscenes. But on Monday, after his surgery was done, and he was sitting up andeating his supper while looking for something to watch on the hospital tv, I wrote.Even though I didn’t have any scenes thought out, I wrote for 3 hours, puttingmore than 1,200 words on the page. Not bad.
And now the worst example. At one point during my firstmarriage, my then-husband criticized my writing. Not in a good way, he meant tobe mean. I gave up writing for 10 years. I wasn’t going to let him be mean tome in that way again. Eventually I divorced him and moved on. And after a fewmore years, I started writing again. It took me time to get back in the grooveof writing, but I enjoy doing it, and I miss it when I don’t get to do it.
Just because you have things crop up that intrude on yourwriting time doesn’t mean that you aren’t a writer. It’s whether or not youpick yourself up and get back to putting words on pages.
