Just Write!

I’ve been virtually nonexistent since my weekend at Disneyland. It wore me out. We were so tired that we came home 5 hours early. I’d like to say that since then I’ve recovered, but I’m always so tired that I can’t tell.

Since then, I’ve had a hard time working on my writing. Between all the things I have going on and my exhaustion, I’ve used every excuse I can to avoid writing. And that’s bad. As a writer, I need to be writing every day. Not just thinking about writing, but physically sitting down with a pen and paper and writing words. So I fell back into one of my bad old habits of procrastinating. And now I’m working my way out of it, starting with a blog post.

I am by nature a dreamer. It’s what makes me a good writer. Unfortunately, it also means that by nature I am a procrastinator. I will find any reason to not get something done. It’s the only quality I truly hate about myself. For example, I just spent ten minutes browsing through a website looking at Star Wars skirts so I wouldn’t have to do this blog post.
It’s a talent, really, a highly refined skill after years of practice. You’d think I’d be referring to writing, not procrastinating.

But that’s the point. Writing should be my highly refined skill after years of practice. Except, you never get better at writing a first draft. The only way you can “get better” is to keep writing and eventually edit.

Honestly, though, your writing never gets better. Your editing certainly improves, though. But you can’t edit anything if you have nothing written in the first place!

We always have to start somewhere. But luckily as writers we have no need to be perfect the first 500 times we write something. Any writing is good as long as you are still writing. It isn’t until you stop writing that you lose the title of “writer”.

But what makes you stop writing? Fear. Doubt. Discouragement. We all struggle with it, writers and non writers alike. Those little voices of self-doubt wear us down until we can’t handle it anymore.

We don’t know how to continue writing when it will never be good enough for anyone to see. Sometimes it is so bad that we don’t even have the courage to let a close friend read it. What if no one cares about what we’re writing?

But isn’t that why we write? Because paper is there for our words when no one else is. We, as writers, are filled with words. They pour out onto the page because we can’t keep it inside. The words need a place to go.

So we write. We keep writing. Whether anyone will ever see it or not, we have to keep writing. It’s ingrained deep inside of us as writers and creators and we can’t escape it. We have to keep writing because it’s the only thing we can do about the words inside of us.
So we keep writing.