Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Matters of Motivation and other things

I have not written a word in more than a month.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I've written a couple of articles for the university paper. I've been writing in my journal with a bit more regularity, though not as much as I would like, and I wrote many, many thank-you notes. I've even written a paragraph or two for one of my WIP's.
But actually WRITE? As in, sit down for a segment of time devoted solely to furthering one of my stories? Nope. Not even a little bit.
To say I am frustrated is kind of like saying Hurricane Katrina was a nasty storm--vast, enormous understatement. I've tried a number of times to sit down and get to work, but something--sometimes incredibly stupid somethings--always gets in the way. Or I am out of energy. Or the cat is annoying. Or, most worryingly, I simply can't think of anything.
I asked my husband yesterday if he thought it was possible for someone's imagination to die from lack of use. I certainly feel that way lately--my brain doesn't seem to generate stories anymore. I don't dream anymore ,except when I have nightmares and those, to be honest, are very boring and repetitive. I can't even create original nightmares anymore! What is happening to my brain?!
He said, very simply, "no, but it's like playing soccer--the longer you let it go un-practiced, the harder it is to get back into it."
This both makes me feel better and more concerned. I've bemoaned several times with writer friends about how much EASIER it was for me to write when I was younger, and how the ideas flowed faster and more freely back then. What I seem to have forgotten til now is that when I was writing back then, I was not only writing faster and more freely, but I was writing All. The. Time. And I do mean all: at night after I had been told to go to sleep, in class when I should have been taking notes, on family vacations, in the dentist's office, literally every-bleeding-where. And that is probably the biggest difference between my writing then and my writing now. I am not writing nearly as much quantity as I did then. And it's starving my imagination.
This time last year, I had just started my job at Borders, and I was trying to galvanize my foundering imagination. I brought a notebook with me everywhere so that I could write at any time. And I made progress. Not the same speed-of-light-and-excellence progress I made when I was younger, but progress all the same. Now? The notebook is still in my bag, but that's all it is doing, is just sitting there. I need to find a way to get out of this slump, to start writing again, either on the computer or in my notebooks, anything to just get WORDS MOVING AGAIN GAH.
okay, end the complaining portion of this post. Moving on to the strategy part.
When we were on our honeymoon, Dennis suggested that I devote at least 1 hour each day to writing, absolutely no excuses. I thought this was a fabulous idea but (naturally) once we got back to the real world, with our real jobs and our real responsibilities, that ephemeral piece of an idea was immediately relegated to the bottom of the heap. It is time to bring it back up and see what can be done with it. 1 hour a day of writing--any kind of writing, be it blogging here, free-writing something on the computer or in my notebook, working on any sort of story, or hell even writing "I'm stuck I'm stuck I'm stuck" ten billion times. And to hold me to this strategy, I am going to post my hour's worth of writing on here, starting today.
Fingers crossed that this works.

~Katherine

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