I saw someone asking in a subreddit recently about why it’s do difficult to start writing. I didn’t explore the conversation, but I very much resonate with the question. As I realize that I haven’t posted anything in this space in an embarrassingly long time, I find myself thinking about how difficult it is to just sit down at the keyboard and begin. I would love to offer the excuse that it’s because of time…family, two kiddos, some recent job instability…and all of that would be true to a degree, but if I’m honest with myself, I find myself wandering the house most weekends because I have free time and am somehow uncertain what to do with it.
Perhaps this is leftover from my grad school days…free time then meant that I had either forgotten something that was due for a class or was intentionally procrastinating it. That would, at least, be defensible. There’s also a chance that it’s leftover from my career change when I freelanced for a living, and thus worked 60+ hour weeks on the regular. That’s less defensible when I think about the time for much more important things that I sacrificed, but such are the lessons that we learn with time.
Whatever the case, it seems that pushing those first few keystrokes out of the keyboard, or writing the few lines in my journal, are a herculean effort, but, once they are finished, the dam breaks and everything gushes out. The other thing that happens is that I feel so much healthier after, because otherwise all of the thoughts and dialogue and characters are just swirling around in my head with nowhere to go, and I end up grumpy because of the buildup.
A few months ago, I forced myself to write a scene experiment for some fiction that I’ve had knocking around in my head for a while. The result wasn’t bad…my daughter, growing into a quite the writer herself, gave it a decent review. I’d like to see where that goes. I’d like to finish that novel I started before she was born (talk about an embarrassingly long time). I want to just use my time more wisely.
I was sitting in my office today pulling some old textbooks off the shelf and thinking fondly of grad school days that were made up of reading and writing. That’s when I launched this blog as an experiment (blogs were cool then). I miss those days, but, rather than get caught in a nostalgia loop of wishing I could get them back, I’m going to do more here, and everywhere else that I can, to just write.
And that’s it. That’s the entire purpose of this post. I just needed to write.
Thanks for reading.