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.