Don’t Want to Write

Today, and to be totally honest, lots of days this summer, I have not been in the mood to write. It used to be that I did it anyway. First thing. Now I look at email and Twitter and Facebook first. I am upset that somehow I lost my writing routine. Social media is a fun place for writers to hang out. But you go to the bar after work, not before.

I finally decided I would look up my old posts on motivation (there were only four of them) to see if I could find anything I could use now. This is from August last year:

Yesterday…

I made coffee instead of tea, did some morning pages while sipping that first cup of coffee. As usual my journal was a bitchfest. And then I just stopped. I was not into brooding. I decided to let my body lead and leave my thinking mind behind. So I watched an Oprah show I’d taped over the weekend. I never watch television in the morning. Just switching to an unfamiliar schedule turned out to be the way to turn off the me, me, me.

After that hour, without even thinking about it, I came up to my writing room and worked on WIP for an hour. Then I walked on my treadmill and did some yoga and weights.  

When I woke up today the two things I did not want to do were 1.write 2. exercise. I did them anyway. I put away my short term “don’t wanna” went on a little t.v. vacation and  then cruised on the sweetness of how having done those two things would make me feel.

A lot of the time it isn’t that I want to write. It’s that I want to have written. Always, I don’t want to exercise, and always I want to have gotten in some exercise. So that’s the key. Not what I want to do in the moment but what I want to have done by the day’s end.

Switching things up every now and then seems to be the key. Must be time to switch from social media first thing to working on the novel first thing.