What prompted your resuming? I was able to think of some more specific things:
Reading and writing about writer's block, in particular books like If you Want to Write and The Midnight Disease and so on. Friends rave about The Artist's Way, but it didn't do that much for me. Attacking it like it was a _problem,_ rather than a personal moral character failing that could be instantly cured if I just sat down in front of my computer at eight ayem every day.
Seeing the movie Rent. This is going to sound miserably soppy, but the first time I heard them sing "No day but today" I cried buckets. As you may remember I had a v gifted young music teacher who died of AIDS at 36 (this Nov I'll be his age -- which feels v odd) and I just felt painfully aware that I could get hit by a bus, or something like that, and how would I feel if I hadn't at least _tried_ to start writing again?
Realizing how I was keeping myself from writing -- a lot of this was drinking, and television. I have the shameful problem of having too _much_ free time (no job, no kids), rather than the lack of free time a lot of people I know struggle with, so my time is v unstructured. Just being more aware of how much time I was spending on LJ, for example, or watching TV or reading books, and trying to be sort of -- responsible for it.
Also -- not damning myself for making v slow progress, or sometimes, making no progress. One thing I saw in AA was when people "slipped," as they say, and drank again, they'd frequently do what people who've cheated on diets do -- say "Screw it, if I've messed up all this was worth nothing," and throw all the work they'd done so far away. If I started up writing again, and then didn't write for a day or a week or whatever, I gritted my teeth against self-criticism that I was a Failure and Would Never Make It and so on. Another thing they say in AA (as you can tell AA had quite an influence on my thinking, ha) is, rather than regret what you did in your past, "It took every drink you ever had to get you here." And also, "You didn't become an alcoholic in a day, and you can't get better in a day." So just feeling like I _am_ trying, and that's progress, helped a lot.
Writing every day. I know friends who don't like the "you _must_ write every day" rule, but if I don't do it, it is v easy for me to fall silent again. Writing _something,_ no matter how short or bad. Scheduling time in my study -- even if I didn't do any writing at all -- worked too.
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just a bit more
Date: 2006-07-09 12:52 pm (UTC)What prompted your resuming?
I was able to think of some more specific things:
Reading and writing about writer's block, in particular books like If you Want to Write and The Midnight Disease and so on. Friends rave about The Artist's Way, but it didn't do that much for me. Attacking it like it was a _problem,_ rather than a personal moral character failing that could be instantly cured if I just sat down in front of my computer at eight ayem every day.
Seeing the movie Rent. This is going to sound miserably soppy, but the first time I heard them sing "No day but today" I cried buckets. As you may remember I had a v gifted young music teacher who died of AIDS at 36 (this Nov I'll be his age -- which feels v odd) and I just felt painfully aware that I could get hit by a bus, or something like that, and how would I feel if I hadn't at least _tried_ to start writing again?
Realizing how I was keeping myself from writing -- a lot of this was drinking, and television. I have the shameful problem of having too _much_ free time (no job, no kids), rather than the lack of free time a lot of people I know struggle with, so my time is v unstructured. Just being more aware of how much time I was spending on LJ, for example, or watching TV or reading books, and trying to be sort of -- responsible for it.
Also -- not damning myself for making v slow progress, or sometimes, making no progress. One thing I saw in AA was when people "slipped," as they say, and drank again, they'd frequently do what people who've cheated on diets do -- say "Screw it, if I've messed up all this was worth nothing," and throw all the work they'd done so far away. If I started up writing again, and then didn't write for a day or a week or whatever, I gritted my teeth against self-criticism that I was a Failure and Would Never Make It and so on. Another thing they say in AA (as you can tell AA had quite an influence on my thinking, ha) is, rather than regret what you did in your past, "It took every drink you ever had to get you here." And also, "You didn't become an alcoholic in a day, and you can't get better in a day." So just feeling like I _am_ trying, and that's progress, helped a lot.
Writing every day. I know friends who don't like the "you _must_ write every day" rule, but if I don't do it, it is v easy for me to fall silent again. Writing _something,_ no matter how short or bad. Scheduling time in my study -- even if I didn't do any writing at all -- worked too.