Showing Up

I have stuggled over the past three years with writing. My job interferes. It's hard to write when my kids are awake. My father passed away. While these all have some effect on my writing, the truth is that none of them are to blame.

The real issue was that I was filling my time with other things. Playing chess online. Facebook. Playing miscellaneous video games. Watching movies. There's nothing wrong with these ideas, but they are not helping me move forward in my writing. Recently I shut myself out of the Internet for a few weeks. I focused on reading a book on writing that I bought three years ago and have never worked through it past the third chapter. I focused on it is if it were a class, taking notes and not moving on until I finished the assignment at the end of each chapter. This helped, but it is not the biggest motivation for the change.

I have also committed to getting up early so that I can freewrite for 10-30 minutes every morning before I go to work. This means I need to get to bed earlier so that I can wake up at 5:11 am. This mornign I was running behind, but I still made time to sit and write for 15 minutes. I have made writing a must each day. I may not be producing great writing during these times, but I am making myself available for the writing to come out.

The biggest fight is getting started, but once I get started, writing every day is not that hard.