This seems obvious, doesn’t it? But the truth is most of us creative writers, wannabe and newbie writers struggle with the issue of simply putting words to paper consistently. We can talk a good game, we can hem and haw, and dream, babble, blame, hesitate, masticate, pontificate and spool an endless stream of reasons why we didn’t get around to writing today. “Work, work, work, I’m just soooo busy at work.” “A family issue came up.” “I’m too tired.” (try that one consistently in your relationship and see how long it lasts)!
Sorry, your relationship with writing is only slightly different than your relationship with people!
My personal favorite “I’m not feeling it, there’s just nothing there right now.” And on it goes driving us further and further away from our dream of seeing our ideas have a positive influence on other people and the world. Please don’t forget writing is a practice, like walking, or riding a bike. Once you finally surrender and start doing it all the time, it doesn’t feel like a thing you have to practice, it just feels like you are engaging with life. You get good by doing, not by fantasizing.
I feel silly repeating what so many have said before me, but maybe I feel I have to since I finally turned a corner in my own writing. I think I must have crossed the 10,000 hour mark. (According to Malcom Gladwell, in order to get proficient at something you have to practice it for 10,000 hours). That’s a lot of hours. I was trying to calculate up all the time I spent writing, editing, and re-writing my recent memoir. Even pushing it, I came up with only about 3,000 hours. That would be 8 hours a day for 365 days. I max out writing at four hours a day four or five days a week. Do the math. Yes it took me four something years. Fortunately I could add in the twelve to fifteen years I have joyfully spent writing poetry. Hard to calculate exactly, but I figure I’m damn close to 10,000 hours.
But whose counting, I mean really, we’re in it for the love of process and imaginative discovery or not at all. There’s lot of other things to do with our time as human beings, but I can’t think of anything more rewarding than sharing one’s take on this exquisitely magical, twisted, gorgeously bumbling, wounded, perpetually healing, world—and how I happen to experience it.
I simply have fun seeing what I think, and exploring tweaks of language to make it a bit more yummy and compelling for the reader.
I’m here to help expand consciousness a hair in the right, positive direction. I write to laugh and to cry and to love-out, and truth-out loud on the page. And besides that I write to write, there need not be a reason, but there definitely need be a consistent practice! So get on it friends, write in the face of fear and resistance and see fear and resistance wither in the presence of your commitment to write!
Take your writing commitment to the next level with my upcoming online course Brilliant Writer: The Master Class for Successful Writers
For more writing tips and tricks check out my YouTube channel —> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDUXkLV0Hmp3VZ0rDNE6aig
And my upcoming events can be found here—> https://albertflynndesilver.com/classes
