Working on the write-a-thon I find myself approaching my laptop with much the same dread as a dentist’s drill.
Do I gotta?
Yes, young lady. You made a commitment. Now write!
What happened? When I was a kid, you couldn’t stop me from writing! I filled entire spiral notebooks while sitting in a tree with uncomfortable bark under my butt and tiny red spiders crawling on my arms!
It really had a branch shaped like that. Over a stream!
All my writer friends agree — they love writing. They just hate doing it. “I need to get my butt in the chair,” is a lament I hear all the time.
Why isn’t writing fun anymore? Have I lost my sense of wonder? Am I now a COMPLETE HACK WITH NO GOOD IDEAS?
I remember the first time I got a criticism on my fiction writing. It happened to be – big shock – the first time I showed my fiction to someone who was neither a family member nor a teacher. Picture an afternoon in the high school computer lab, and there’s the cute boy I have a crush on. I hand him the manuscript I just printed and await praise…
I spent weeks crying over that critique. I highlighted every “I” in the manuscript in red. I wrote in my journal, “I can’t get away from ‘I’. I’m stupid. I’m arrogant. I’m egotistical. I, I, I, I. GAH I’m doing it here! I want to kill myself!”
In college, I even wrote a poem about that!
“That, which, was, but — words become
Suppressing fire covering
The I, I, I – holes torn in the page.”
Writing lost a little of its fun that day. I had to stop before I wrote an “I.”
That’s all it is. I haven’t lost my wonder.
I’m just trying harder.
Inner Child coulda had a V8.
Every time I discovered something new about writing, it got to be a little more work.
Which is a sign of getting BETTER, not worse.
Now, to get my butt back in the chair and work on this write-a-thon!
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