Writing

Writing is bloody hard. It’s kind of like giving birth, I think, but the birth canal runs from your head to your fingertips. It’s easy enough to do it when you’re not thinking about it, because then your body just takes over mechanically and your hands just type the words that are in your head.

When that happens it’s like speaking or breathing and it’s effortless.

But when that doesn’t happen, and you stop and think in between sentences and realize just how grindingly hard it is to churn them out, then it becomes painful.

There are days when I cannot stop writing and there are days when I cannot force myself to sit at my computer for more than a couple of minutes without feeling like all my limbs are itching to move. Sometimes I’ll shut out the world, happily, so I can focus on my work and other times I’ll find just about any excuse to get away from it. And those sorts of days can happen back to back. I’ll have one really good day where I get lots done and then a day when I just can’t bring myself to look at it.

I know what everyone says about needing a rest period. But what can I say? I’m a workaholic – have been ever since I did my PhD – and I like to throw myself into things so I won’t realize just how boring my ordinary hum-drum life is. Writing is my thing now. I do it so I won’t have to live in the real world with everyone else. If I have a day off from it, it really grinds along so that I feel like I’ve just wasted my time.

But the truth is that it’s just not possible to be creative all the time, and even less possible to do it on demand. It’s tricky, you’ve got to want to do it. And it’s got to be natural, or it won’t be any good. It’s like being hungry or wanting to have sex or something; it’s an urge. It doesn’t happen at prescribed times, it just happens. And then it goes away for a while and comes back.

But this was not what I wanted to write about. What I really wanted to talk about was that feeling I get when I can’t write. As if I’m trying to squeeze something out of myself that just doesn’t want to go – blood out of a stone, all that sort of stuff. It feels like a shutter has slammed in my head and I just can’t think. Or it might be that I just have too many ideas in my head all at once and I can’t sort them out properly.

Sometimes I do just get deluged by things that go whizzing through my head and there’s so much of it that I just know if I sit down to write it all down I’ll be there for hours, possibly all day, and that fear that comes with the prospect of commitment – you know the thing where you know you’re signing yourself up for a headache and, as soon as you touch the keyboard, you just know that you can’t face it – that comes upon me and then, unless I really force myself to take the plunge and wade in, I just can’t do it.

Writing is a weird thing. It’s sometimes like you hit the pain barrier before you even start and you have to push through a wall and just keep going so that you don’t notice what a great gargantuan effort you’ve just made. Once you’re on a roll it’s fine, away you go. But it’s that first sentence, that first paragraph, that first bit that gets you going – that’s what’s hard.

The trick is to keep going. That’s what I think. Just start. Start with anything. And then write what’s in your head. Talk to yourself in your head, imagine a scene, and say what you see. Write it all down, as much as you can.

And don’t stop until it’s done. Just keep on going.

And going . . .

And going . . .

That’s all I’ve done here. And I’m stopping . . .

Now.