The Price of Owning Up

by | May 20, 2013 | Blog | 3 comments

Remember how I said I want to be a writer?

Now I know it’s there – I can’t ignore it.

I haven’t been here for weeks and I have 437 excuses. A legitimate one is that we moved house (yay) but that was my excuse for far too long.

So now I’ve owned up and said, yep – I want to write.  But I’m not doing it.  And every day I feel anxious and guilty, and every day it gets a teeny bit worse and worse and now it’s unbearable, so here I am.

I don’t have anything particularly much to say, but that’s an excuse to hide behind, really. So I’ll write anyway (I promise I’ll get some prompts and/or try harder for material so it’s not all rambles about rambling on nothingness).

Through writing you put yourself out there, and that’s fucking scary.  What if I have no ideas, if I sit patiently and nothing comes?  What if I’m shit? What if nobody likes me?

Or what if I hide behind almost-crippling fear and never do anything and wind up at 90 thinking endlessly and only ‘what if?’

3 Comments

  1. Bob Harding
    Bob Harding on July 22, 2013 at 11:32 am

    This is pretty intense and raw stuff! Dripping with emotion and fear. That’s good I think.

    Besides, it’s good to know fear. We can’t learn to be brave without it.

    This really hits close to home. Asked myself a lot of the same questions. Especially when I should’ve been sleeping.

    One day I realized that 10 years had passed in which I’d only done what I thought everyone else expected me to do. That was a tough one. And then I decided I would not let it happen again.

    The only way to get anywhere is to go for it.

    Cheers!
    Bob
    http://thehousenewf.blogspot.ca/

  2. California Matt
    California Matt on July 31, 2013 at 3:26 pm

    Writing is a habit. What made it work for me was giving myself permission to only hammer out 500 words a day. I say 500 – 2000, but its really more like 500 a day for half the week, 1000 maybe one other day, and then that one day where I go crazy and its 2000 – 4000. I type pretty fast, so when I fall through that hole in the page, look out.

    500 words is easy. I’ll probably have half of that count by the time I finish this reply. You can type 500 words in ten minutes.

    But it keeps that writing habit alive. 500 words of new material a day – times seven days a week without fail – starts to add up pretty fast.

    The thing is it has to be 500 words you intend to publish, and it has to be brand new material. Nothing else counts.