Anonymous

Nope, haven’t done B. 🙂

B: How often do you write?

Hmmmm, for a given value of ‘writing?’  😀  I open up and poke at a document almost every day.  Whether I always accomplish something….well, not always.  Sometimes all I manage to do is twiddle around a few words, or change a sentence.  Sometimes I’m pretty sure the sentence didn’t even need to be changed.

Many a professional or otherwise experienced writer will tell you that the thing to do is just to get your words out.  Do some every day, whether they come easy or hard, whether they make any actual sense or not.  Ray Bradbury would free-write for a while every morning.  Sometimes it turned into a story, or part of a story.  Sometimes it was total crap.

I hope that one day, that will be me, but currently I still struggle with judgy walls in my brain.  My mind sets up checkpoints that the words have to go through, and if it decides the words aren’t ‘good enough’ then sometimes it sends them back.  

It’s stupid, really.  Because the thing about writing is that you can always FIX IT.  The wording of your ideas can be absolutely butt-ugly when you first write them down; it doesn’t matter.  Once you get them on the page where you won’t forget them, you can poke and prod at the words as much as you please to make them pretty and eloquent.  And I KNOW, intellectually and some days even emotionally, that I’m a good writer.  I KNOW that I am an excellent editor and that, given time, I will be able to make the words dance to my tune like I’m the freaking Pied Piper.  But.  The human mind can be pretty stupid about its hang-ups.

My tolerance is getting better.  A lot of it depends on my emotional state, these days.  If I’m feeling good, then I can tolerate a lot of crappiness and the words will flow much more freely (regardless of whether they’re good or crummy).  If I’m feeling stressed, depressed, or otherwise emotionally drained, then it’s harder for me to shut down those internal voices and just let things happen.

I’ve been having a rough time, the past few months.  This winter’s been hard on my mood, so it’s been harder to write and what I do write needs more work.

But still.  I write or edit—when I’m working on my own stories, editing counts as a form of writing, so far as I’m concerned—every day.  Sometimes more successfully than others.  But a lot of it is about the mindset.  Keep THINKING like a writer, keep your head in the ‘I’m a writer’ zone, that you’re going to continue thinking about stories and thinking about producing stories and if you failed to write today, by god you’ll do it tomorrow.

Otherwise—at least for me, and I suspect for most people—it’s all too easy to let it slip away.  After a few days of not writing, you’re still thinking about writing, and about how you should write, and about the things that you want to write.  But after a few weeks of not writing, you start thinking, “Eh, it’s hard and how much do I really care?  How much do I really need writing in my life?”

For a questionably-lucky few, they have no choice.  They’ll write or their brains will explode—and I call them questionably lucky because I’ve dealt with the people who are born artists, and it’s not easy on them.  Their minds and lives are not entirely their own to control; the art makes its demands of them, almost in a form of insanity.

For the rest of us, we don’t NEED writing.  But if we WANT to write, if we choose to make that a priority over so many other demands and ways we could be spending our time, we have to commit to it.  It’s easy when the ideas come easy and the words are flowing, but when it’s work, it’s up to you to make the choice of whether you want to continue being a writer or not.

It’s not always an easy choice.  Writing in the hard times can be pretty draining, and it does take personal resources of time, attention and mental stamina that sometimes are required elsewhere.  Sometimes you have to be kind of obsessive and maybe even a little selfish about it, if you decide to prioritize writing in your life.  Many times in my life, to be honest, I have ceased to be a writer.  I’ve always written in the easy seasons, when inspiration is chasing me.  But when it turned hard and I had to struggle for the words and decide whether to keep making the effort to fight for them, usually I gave it up.

I’m actually nearing a point of decision about that now.  I’ve got enough crap going on—job-hunting, my grandmother’s health failing, my family under a lot of stress and the seasonal mood swings really battering me—that it’s possible I’ll decide to give it up.  But I don’t know.  This time I think maybe I want to stick to it.