Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
In 2010, I said everything. In 2015, I said fear. In 2016, I said that it’s sitting down and doing it.
In 2017, I said that it was work. In 2018, I said that it was lack of support.
But this year? At first glance, it was work. But for the first half of the year, I took a CCSF class in fiction—the intro class. I am not sure if through it, I was burnt out. Because shortly before it ended, I decided that I had to follow through on a promise that I had made to myself—to quit my writing group. The one that I had been thinking of quitting for a long time due to a number of factors.
And so I could say that the latter half of the year is this idea of the lack of accountability. But it’s not that either.
It’s possibly…simply the idea that the consistency isn’t there. I used to write every day on this blog. But then other things took precedence. The job. The TV watching—yes, lots of that. And then there was this guilt that I still wasn’t finishing the novel. The inability to finish editing.
With a lack of a group, I don’t have the accountability but I also mostly lack of the consistency of simply sitting down and writing. I don’t have the structures that I used to build myself because I used to have so many online friends which lowered the barrier to simply writing.
The computer tires me. The Internet tires me. All I do notice is that my short quips have made it. But my long drawn out thoughts don’t.
Maybe though that’s the thing that needs to be invirogated. to build up that consistency again. To make me love the written word.