Writing Wednesday: But I Don’t Want To!

[eilis_oneal]

We all have those days. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been writing for six months or six years-or sixty years, I assume (I’ll let you know for sure when I get there)-but we all have days where we just don’t want to write. We’re tired. We’re cranky. We’re distracted by important things going on in the other parts of our lives, or by unimportant but

Comments

[sargon999]

I don't know. I mostly just do it. On such an unforgiving schedule as the one we keep, I don't have the luxury of not feeling like it very often. Sometimes I'll give myself permission to not write, and that releases enough pressure that I end up writing anyway. Otherwise, what always works is I tell myself "You wrote 50,000 words of a novel out longhand, at work, in between phone calls, you have no reason to be picky now."

[eilis_oneal]

Sometimes I'll give myself permission to not write, and that releases enough pressure that I end up writing anyway.

It is funny to me how well that works, apparently for many people.

[naamah_darling]

But I also think it’s partially that I’ve given myself an out, the knowledge that I could quit after one page without feeling guilty, that keeps me going. I don’t feel pressured to write when I don’t feel like it, and that frees me up to actually begin to feel like it.

That's exactly what it is. I do this with writing, though because of teh crazy, I am often legitimately blocked because I cannot focus (less often these days, thank heavens). I also do this in the studio. Most of what I do passes through an "I don't wanna" phase. It's easy to get bogged down there. If I can get rolling on that, a lot of the time I can push through it and get to the fun bits. It's also why I like having several projects in different stages of completion. I can use the part of Project B that I really like as a reward for working on the part of Project A that I hate.

[eilis_oneal]

I can use the part of Project B that I really like as a reward for working on the part of Project A that I hate.

That does sound like a really helpful way to go about it. (Only wish I could have more than one large-scale writing project going at once so I could try it out in that arena.)

[naamah_darling]

Yeah, that's exactly why it doesn't work too well in the long-form writing arena!