The First Step Is Committing Yourself to Doing the Work

My newest resolution is to write every day, and to spend most of that time focusing on a creative outlet (not on emotional vomit blog posts, for example). Which is probably what I should've been doing all along if I wanted to be a creative writer, to be honest. But that's ok. Better late than never as the saying goes.

I've been doing pretty well over the last week. I'm now beginning week three of The Artist's Way and I've made some pretty good strides in overcoming some of my personal obstacles. I think that me actually doing any sort of creative work is a huge indicator of progress because I usually can't do anything at all. It's that damn cement wall I have inside of me. All of the creative stuff has been behind it for decades and I keep waiting for it to crack.

I'm starting to gain a bit of momentum now. The negative voices in my head are becoming more of a din, more quiet, less powerful I think. I'm no longer having to fight so hard to turn off the "this sucks, why are you even bothering?" kind of dialogue that often swirls around when I try to write. And I started the whole process by just committing myself to writing.

It was a decision I made one day to create a private blog as space for writing practice, and to disallow any negative self-judgment of any kind. The first post was a painful writing session where I felt like my fingers were moving in slow motion across the keys, unable to produce much of anything, and I sensed a dark blob of frustration filling my chest and expanding into my ribs and throat. Meanwhile the voices in my head roared behind iron bars, trying to get to me, trying to escape. But I kept them locked there and I finished the (very short) piece I had set out to do.

The next time it was a little easier. And the time after that, easier still. I suspect it will continue to get easier as I go - as long as I remain committed to just doing it.

My current long-term goal is to start working on my next novel in August. I'm going to sit down and do the work after we come back from our cruise, when I will have some good uninterrupted time to just focus on getting a story out of my head. Until then I'm taking small steps to map out scenes and plot elements, that way when I get to August I'll be fully ready to do the work.

So perhaps that's my biggest lesson from the past three weeks as I continue my quest to unblock my writer's block: that I can't do anything if I don't commit to just doing it, regardless of the voices in my head. And it's not easy. It's also not something that I don't already know deep inside. I guess it's just taken me years (decades) to get to a place where I'm ready to push through the roadblocks and put words on paper.

Something I read in The Artist's Way last night said (and this is a paraphrase, I'm not a kick-ass memorizer) that artists should expect periods of growth and periods of stagnation. That the process is often one step forward and a few steps back, so we should learn to think of the barren periods as resting time.

Resting time. I like that.

I'm still growing, I've just been resting for the last six months.

The Autobiographical Nature of Writing

I've discovered something recently that I think most people less blocked than me have long ago realized: that most writing is autobiographical in nature. Maybe not fully autobiographical (or maybe it is, for some) but in the sense that bits and pieces have been taken from our lives and strung together into whatever story flows onto the page.

I started thinking about why this is the case, and here is what I came up with so far:

• We can only write about things we know. Even mystical worlds are based on some sort of reality that we have witnessed, or that has inspired our vision.
• We often write to make sense of life. This includes events in our own lives, in the lives of those around us, or in the lives of people halfway across the world.
• We likely write from a divine source. I feel like anything that is being channeled through us as inspiration would, by default, have to be based on some sort of experience (perhaps a spiritual one).

I was sitting here tonight talking to God, which I do from time to time. I was asking him why this, why that, why so much suffering, why so much pain. Why was I even born. (Yeah, I was crying for a little while.)

And then I asked whatever is up there, for the third time this week, to help me do something with all of it so that my existence could have some meaning. Please make the suffering have a reason, I said with my mind's voice to the dark sky above. Please let me do something with it, please let it not all be for naught, please help me.

I sat quietly (the best way to sit if you want to really hear) and I wondered how I could channel everything into my writing. And then I started thinking about Isabella.

Isabella is both a character and a title that I came up with many years ago for a novel. She is fully formed in my mind and has been from the start, although the story around her has been fuzzy. She is very much like me, in fact, which is not surprising. She has brown hair with gentle curls that fall around her face. She is inquisitive. She is smart. She is shy.

She is an orphan.

While sitting in the quiet, talking to God, asking how to make sense of everything....I suddenly found Isabella's story. I'd been waiting for years for it to come to me. I knew she existed but I didn't know why, or what she would be doing.

I think, finally...FINALLY...I know.

Will it be autobiographical? Of course! To a point. Isn't everything autobiographical in some way? See my explanation above, lest you've forgotten my logic already.

In fact, it will be something I know (I'm not an orphan, but I have felt like one many times in my life), it will help me make sense of my life and the actions of others around me, and it will help me grasp at answers to my questions. Answers that will have to come from the infinite universe, or God, because I don't have those answers yet.

In the past I would not allow myself to base any of my "creations" on my own reality or on anyone else's. I know it's sort of silly, and perhaps this is why I've been blocked for so long, but I thought doing so would mean I'm not authentic enough or creative enough.

And, friends please listen to me, this is such a fallacy. Nothing is new. Nothing in the entire universe is new! Everything is recycled.

Every. Story. Out. There. Is. Recycled.

Every love story has been told. Every adventure story has been told. Every mystery has been told and/or solved. Every adventure - real or fictional - has been thought of even if never written down. My life or some version of it has been repeated before and will be repeated again. It is the nature of our existence as humans.

And all of these things are the only sources of inspiration we have for our stories, for our art, for our music, for our poetry. Where else would the inspiration come from? It has to come from our experiences, whether they are material experiences or spiritual experiences.

I'm grateful for the progress I've made in the last week in unblocking my writer's block. I'm continuing to work my way through The Artist's Way and have committed myself to practicing creative writing on a daily (or at least an every other day) basis. I'm very pleased to see that something is finally shifting with this particular story idea. I'm extra pleased to see that when I was begging the universe for some sort of answer tonight, I found something to grasp onto.

Sometimes You Should Write Crap

Tonight I committed myself to writing crap. Because if I don't write crap, how will I ever write something that's non-crap?

I decided to start a new blog to use exclusively for this experience, since writing by hand can't keep up with my speeding brain once I get going. It's a private blog and only available for my eyes, so don't go looking for it out of morbid curiosity. I'll save the train wreck reading experience for myself.

Most artists (it seems) have a litany of random pieces of work - both finished and unfinished - that never see the light of day. So I figured I ought to have some of those by now. Er, some more of those by now (I already have three unfinished books).

I do have a drawer full of journals, but I don't really think journaling counts (especially since I journal, like, thrice yearly these days). But when I journal I'm not being creative or trying to connect with a special part of myself that I want to share. I'm pretty much documenting my day or bitching about some aspect of my life journey.

Hence the new (private) blog. It will be specifically used for my art and to create as much crap as I possibly can. And you know what? I already created my first piece of crap tonight. I called it "Firefly" because I saw some fireflies at the park and I wanted to write about that experience.

So I sat down, started typing, and found that I didn't really have much to say when it came down to it. I find this happens quite often, and I usually become very discouraged and resign myself to being a failure forever (italics are for added drama). But this time I fought actively to not let my brain go there. I told myself to keep writing, even if the words I was typing already looked like absolute crap.

And that's a good thing, because when I was done with the ultra short piece I'd written, I noticed there were a couple of good sentences nestled in there. I read them and said to myself, "Huh, well that sentence isn't bad at all." And maybe if I keep on with it, over time I'll get more good sentences and less crap.

It seems like this week has been transformative in that I've decided that my work is not mine. Because is it really? Everything I do and everything I am is controlled by something larger than myself. So my goal now is to just get out of the way. To write the crap so that the good stuff can come out, and to stop focusing on it being crap.

The crap is mine. It's what's blocking the good stuff from coming out. And the good stuff belongs to a higher power.

Well, at least that's the path I'm going to follow for now. And by now, I mean tomorrow. Because it's late and it's time to go read a book!