Today I have sat at my desk going through the files for my Work in Progress and I have just been overwhelmed by how much there is left to write for the story. In Stephen King’s book, On Writing, he talks about how sometimes writing is just shoveling shit from a seated position. I’m really feeling that today.
In a weird way, going through my files is procrastination. I have some chapters that I need to work on and honestly, I have just hit a wall of I Don’t Wanna. There is still so much ground to cover and why can’t I just hand over a bunch of garbage to some editor and they can put the book together for me? Man. I feel really rough right now and I have really been bad with the distractions today.
As you are reading this, you are seeing the fruits of one of my efforts to distract myself.
I have sections that need written, but sometimes the content is pretty…hard. I don’t always want to delve into those places in my mind, so I distract myself. I avoid. Man, I could write the book on avoidance. Maybe I should!
Anyway, we are all capable of doing the hard work and getting it done, but it just means sometimes we have to eat the elephant one bite at a time. We have to keep moving forward one small step at a time, one foot in front of the other. Today is a day I really have to push myself to do this. Today I want to do things like write new fun scenes, which is a lot of fun, but unfortunately it means neglecting the ones that need to be written which aren’t as fun. They are telling the story, but they aren’t what I want to disappear into.
Anyway, enough distractions.
It’s time to get to work. Today writing feels very much like work. And of course there is the burning question of what if it sucks? What if all this effort means that at the end of it it was for nothing? What if nobody wants to buy this book? What if nobody wants to read it? I’ll have wasted all this time. Opening up my heart for this project only to be considered…unworthy of even being published. Like my story isn’t interesting enough for that.
That’s the shit that stings.
Wendigo Mountain 