Mar 23
Why I Didn’t Write This Morning
My therapist — yes, I’ve been seeing a therapist for two months now — suggested that I start a journal. (If he only knew…)
His idea was to write about being stressed out, the causes of my stress (if I can identify them) and to give myself a “stress rating” on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most stressed. After my first visit, I did this faithfully for two weeks then went back and took him a copy. He is presumably reading it, or already has, and so since then, I haven’t written much in it.
The thought occurred to me on Monday that I need to devote a set amount of time to my novel writing, an idea that I have resisted in the past because I was afraid that “forced” writing time wouldn’t produce quality writing. (Doesn’t it sound presumptious to think that my writing done when I wasn’t making myself do it is “quality!”)
But I haven’t felt like writing in my novel for the past two days. This morning, I reopened that stress journal in Word and started writing a few notes to update things since my last entry on February 28th. I wrote three pages. It just came pouring out of me. The bitching and moaning, the whining about life in general, the specifics of things that have stressed me out over the past week and the fears that stress me out about the future…they all just came like a flood onto the paper.
There are days when I am trying to write a single scene of my manuscript when I can’t seem to get one page I’m happy with when I’m trying. Today, I get three pages about my “character” and my “plotline” without really trying. How frustrating. I think I’ll have another entry to write tomorrow because of this!
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March 24th, 2005 at 5:32 am
I suppose a journal, or even a blog, where one can vent is a good thing, but I always think back to a study I saw in the Post a year or so ago that suggested that those who rehash stressful events in writing are actually more stressed than those who simply let it go. The idea behind this is that writing about the event/person/idea is akin to experiencing the initial stressor all over again.
For my part, I try very hard not to vent anywhere, though occasionally it does pop up on my blog, or in conversations with my wife. It’s not always possible to just let things go, though I certainly give it a shot.
March 24th, 2005 at 8:46 am
Hey Pat,
Just a thought. A lot of writers advocate scheduling writing - setting aside a block of time everyday to work. Then writing whether they feel like it or not. A lot of times the best writing might be on that one page that you struggled two hours to come up with. If you only write when you feel like it, you probably won’t get much done.
Now, if I could just get myself to do that…
March 28th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
I have a terrible time scheduling myself for writing time. I get up pretty early, but my four-year old is almost always 15 minutes behind me so that leaves precious little time to write. I miss the days when I had oodles of time at work, and many times, I think about enrolling in a creative writing class so the grade is motivation to write daily. :p