I’ve been neglecting the blog, though it’s for reasonable excuses.
The problem is, there are always reasonable excuses. Always reasons to not write, always things that are important, always things that distract and delay. I will therefore endeavor to not let those things interfere unless I am physically unable to update my blog, which will be the case in mid-October when I’ll be in Europe. Until then…
My apologies.
Tonight’s subject… Writing is hard.
Non writers don’t quite understand this, but any of you reading who are writers of any genre or type know what I’m talking about.
Ideas sometimes cascade from the heavens (in my case usually in the shower) like beautiful gifts from above. Other times they have to be unearthed from the ground like fossils, requiring painstaking and tedious effort. But ideas are arguably the easiest part.
My problem is finishing things. I’m truly terrible at it unless I have some sort of looming penalty for if I don’t, and even then it’s sometimes a struggle. I have trouble finishing a bloody video game, much less a novel. I’ve lost track of the number of games I haven’t finished, books I haven’t read, projects I’ve petered out in the middle of, and of course writing that languishes half-realized.
I’ll write quite feverishly on a piece, and then set it aside, ostensibly to return at a later date and complete it, and oftentimes that’s where it stays. On my hard drive. In the oubliette, where writing goes to be forgotten about.
All hope is not lost, however.
At the current juncture I’m attempting to apply lessons learned in The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s a slim volume that I highly recommend, and it has a place of honor alongside Steven King’s On Writing in my library. It doesn’t make writing less hard, but it does help greatly to teach one to push past the wall (or if you’re an Oatmeal reader, the writing equivalent of the Blerch).
I realize I have been remiss in both writing and blogging and I do hope to remedy this.
Ta
–M
Shadow Truths 