The Blogger's Hypocrisy: A Lesson
I haven’t written in this blog for quite a long time. In the true spirit of professionalism, I’m going to lay the blame on school, my wedding, and the beginning of my full-time employment.
Actually, I don’t want to leave the impression that I haven’t been writing. There were a few months where I used “too busy!” as an excuse not to write, and I paid for it. Here’s how:
The stories I’m working on are of varying lengths — many are short stories, but I have a few ideas that would fill something longer. Everything I’ve been working on has suffered because of my refusal to make time to write. The most obvious problem is that I lost the direction of many of my stories; I forgot why certain characters were being forced to interact with each other, and by extension lost the basis for the story. Luckily, I keep notes handy, so recovering that momentum was a matter of spending an hour re-reading the story and reviewing and revising all related documents. That’s the simplest problem to handle.
The difficult issue to overcome is that I lost a lot of my drive to write. I got out of the habit of writing every day, and then into the habit of filling my writing time with distractions like TV and video games. What happened when I tried to pick it back up? I had reverted to the state of being an “inspiration” writer, the kind of person who only writes when he happens to be at a computer when a good idea strikes. I stopped pushing myself to try new things and took an undisciplined approach to writing, and as a result, was unable to write anything I found satisfying.
I think I’ve made huge strides against this one. In the past few weeks, I’ve made a point to sit down and write at least 300 words, and that has helped immensely. Even when I’m not satisfied with what I write, I’m a lot more motivated to write another draft in the hopes of getting it, if not right, then better.
Challenge: Berate yourself for your laziness and your petty excuses! Then write 300 words.
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It’s hard isn’t it?
Very.
good advice, a displined writing approach is the hardest thing to conquer
I’m glad you’re forcing yourself to write those 300 words. Keep it up!