I’m playing off Hellion’s blog of yesterday. So if you’ve procrastinated yourself into a coma, get your bonny ass to yesterday’s blog and read her fabulous blog and catch up!
Writing isn’t always fun and games.
We would all like to think that we sit down to the computer (or pen and paper if you’re real old school) and pump out 80,000 words in a month and submit it to a publisher and voila! you’re a published writer.
But I’ve realized it doesn’t work that way. And you shouldn’t expect it to be either.
Procrastination is a pirate killer. It causes you to walk the plank, and swim in a circle for hours at a time. And by the time that you’re ready to get back in the ship, you’re surrounded by sharks that have other plans for you. They suck all your energy until you can’t climb back in the ship and resume your writing. You find yourself trying to find reasons to climb back in the ship until you can’t remember the reason why you walked the plank in the first place but there’s no one whispering in your ear anymore. Your muse has jumped ship. She’s been on a deserted island, drinking up all Capt’n Jack’s rum (sorry Hellion!) and roasting her lazy ass on the white sand.
Recently, I roped that bitch back to my side.
For months I spent trying to write. I wasn’t exactly procrastinating as much as I was forcing my writing. It’s almost just as bad. Everything I wrote was mechanical, unreadable, no emotion, no feeling. It just left a bad taste in my mouth. I tried everything I knew. I tried writing something else. I tried focusing on honing a part of my writing. I tried writing sentences to spark an idea. I tried writing on a different chapter. I tried writing some fluff (which I’m very very bad at) and I even took a break from the computer (the biggest sin of them all!). And nothing worked. Nothing at all. And it was frustrating. I’m not the type that talks about things when I’m frustrated. I just let it fester into a boil that won’t go away.
Finally I figured out the key to my muse. Lure her back with the promise of writing whatever she wants.
I dunno if this works for everyone, but I live by freedom in my writing. I’m a free spirit. I write like the wind and let the wind be my guide. When I try to rein myself in, I get all bottled up and I can’t write. At all. So no more of that. I will write on a whelm. I will have a good time doing it. I will not restrain myself. Restraint is good for keeping the info dump away but allowing freedom in your writing is good for your muse.
Sunday, my muse was back with a bad sunburn and a bad attitude. Like usual. She boosted my ass back into the ship and handed me my keyboard. She told me to get my ass in shape or she’d never stay. And with that, I wrote the best 3000 words I’ve written since February. But of course, she doesn’t want to write what I need to write. She wants to write something new. Something fresh. Something that we both know and can attest to. And it made me happy to write for the first time in a year. I can’t tell you the freedom I felt when my fingers hit that keyboard. I can’t remember the last time I pumped out 3k in less than six hours. I used to do it all the time. It’s something I find joy in. And I’ve finally got it back.
So this was my little tale of how I got my pirate groove back. And it didn’t take a jug of rum and a session of pillaging (though I thought about it seriously for a while). What exercises do you use when the procrastination bug strikes? And if it’s never hit you, do you have a back-up plan ready?
