…but I have learned something. Blogging can be – no, not addictive – but one of those things that reproaches you by sitting in the back of your mind saying “you really must attend to this.” As in pay the bills, get that stuff to the dry cleaners, call that old friend you haven’t heard from in ages… Do something about the blogs. Plural yet. No, I realize, I am not nuts as I posited in that first post. What I’m doing is looking for another bolt hole. Something to do instead of write.
One of the most important lessons for novice writers is that writing is really, really hard. It is as if you are trying to cross a huge chasm because something you want desperately is on the other side, but to get it you must launch yourself into space and make an enormous leap of faith. Hard and scary. So you find reasons not to do it. Blogging is one of the more seductive.
You would think that by now I’d have learned how to quell the bad angels. I have not done so entirely – I doubt any writer has – but I can offer a few hard-learned techniques that usually work.
• Apply backside to chair. You can’t write if you don’t sit down to do it.
• Have an established time to do it, and do not allow other things to interrupt that time, if you are capable of controlling them. A sick child takes precedence. A blog – I blush – should not.
• When you are legitimately ready to stop, try to leave the work while a scene is in process. It will be easier to continue the next day, if you do that.
• The other half to the above rule is never stop writing at the end of a scene. However mentally exhausted you are at the end of a major effort to get a sequence of action or a huge confrontation on the page, write a few lines of the next scene before quitting.
• And… Nope. Not here, not now. I’ve got to return to work. More tk. “…It was a dark and stormy night…” (I love that movie. Hope you do too.)