Writing update – May 2016

Well, I’m still writing, so I guess we’ll call that a victory. The last couple months have been rough–not because I haven’t had much time to write, but because I’ve had a hard time convincing myself I even want to write. I won’t bore you with the self-pity and details, but the question “to write or not to write” has been very hard to answer. It’s even overflowed to my blog–I missed nearly an entire week in April, and it kinda felt good not to bother.

It’s still a struggle, and I’m still not sure I’m writing because I want to or only because I don’t know what else to do. It still feels like a chore. But there have been some bright spots. Over the weekend I cranked out a scene that was not work, and actually felt…good. Things clicked together in unexpected and interesting ways that turned out better than what I had originally planned. I really like that when it happens. It makes me feel all writerly.

But it’s also going slowly. I haven’t had a 1000-word writing session in…a long time. Five hundred words seems more the norm these days. And that bothers me. Perhaps it only means that the story hasn’t become exciting enough to me yet. But it could mean something else.

It’s also been hard to keep up my regular column over at the Authors’ Think Tank. It’s usually hard enough to feel like I have any advice or support to give when I’m not really a published writer. It’s entirely another to write advice and support columns when you’re a whisker away from giving up writing altogether. There’s a word for that; it starts with an ‘H’ and ends with a ‘E’ and has an ‘YPOCRIT’ in the middle.

But things have been getting better. For some inexplicable reason my writing seems to be connected to my emotional state. I’ve been rather unmotivated toward life in general of late. It happens, and I’m working on it. The funny thing about life is that so many different aspects are so interconnected that you may not even know where the true problem lies. It can also lead to a form of paralysis where you don’t really know where to start to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get on with life. But lately I’ve had enough and just picked a place to start, and it seems to be helping. Clearly the interconnectedness works in both directions.

Anyway, this is not a desperate cry for sympathy, pity, or reassurance. This is simply a glimpse into the complex, and sometimes dark, workings of the mind of a writer. Those who think that writing is all sunshine and oak desks in beautiful libraries with endless coffee or lemonade have another think coming. It’s work, and as with most jobs, there are days when you just don’t want to get up and go to work, and even when you put on your big-person pants and go anyway it doesn’t automatically mean you love your work. I’d be doing a disservice to anyone considering being a writer if I were to claim it didn’t get that way from time to time.

And perhaps the measure of whether you can call yourself a writer or not is if you can keep writing even when you’re not sure you want to. That or masochism. The two are not mutually exclusive.