#reverb10: On Writing

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Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

The worst thing I do that doesn’t contribute to my writing is…not writing.

That sounds a little silly, so let me explain.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of writing. Writing guest posts, and posts for here, editing interviews for the Pagan Paths series, writing at my private journal on Dreamwidth and at 750 words, the writing I get paid for. You’d think I’d be totally burned out on writing after ramping up to all of that fairly quickly, but no! Not at all. When I was writing finished products every day, I found it so much easier to write, and write well, and get inspired for new ideas for writing. I said something about it to Matt, and he mentioned something he’d read in Free: That ideas are like hydras. You finish one and seven more spring up in its place.

And then I took a quick break for the weekend, after writing through the last two before that, and now I haven’t written anything (aside from this, obviously, and my writing at 750 words) since last Friday. Oops. And I keep putting off writing new things, I’ve got a couple of things I really need to start on (and finish!), including tomorrow’s post, but it’s just so hard to start now!

In order to not stop writing, I need to keep writing. And not just journal-type writing that’s only for me, since I have absolutely no standard for that, but writing that others will see. I need to write those sorts of things, every day. By doing that, I can eliminate my tendency to procrastinate, and my difficulty getting started.

This post is part of the Reverb 10 event – you can read more about that here!