by Claudia Blood
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I have to trick myself into writing.
Yes, I want to be a writer, but writing is HARD. Daydreaming about stories is almost as satisfying as writing them down and far easier. There’s none of that messy grammar or infestation of typos or the pull of everyone’s ideas on the ‘right’ way to write.
Half of you read that sentence and thought ‘your grammar sucks’, the other half thought ‘oh she used the rhetorical device called polysyndeton’, the other half didn’t notice. See? So hard.
But, sigh, I really want to be a writer even with all the rejection, self-doubt, and getting on lists because of my internet searches.
The first trick I tried to make myself write was giving myself a deadline. Yeah, that didn’t work. A year had passed and I still hadn’t finished anything. Started? Yes. Finished, not so much. I was a wuss and couldn’t be my own accountability-buddy.
I tried getting with some writing buddies. I did get some work finished, but as soon as someone cut me slack, I took advantage of it and stopped finishing. My best month was when I participated in a ‘short story a day’ challenge. I posted the story on a shared google drive where my buddies could see it. I did 26 stories that month. There was something about the possibility of my buddies reading them that had me staying up late to finish. For the record, they never did look.
Was there another way I could have that same dynamic? That’s when the idea of the blog struck. If I got in the habit of sitting and writing something, it would eventually turn into finished stories. Right? I might be missing some dots, but it was a start.
The blog was born with no fanfare and no followers. But that’s okay; I could pretend I had followers. It would be the same principle that worked for me before. I set up to have a post every Monday.
I made my deadlines for a while, but it was hard and took way too much time. Trying to figure out what to write in a post was like trying to pick out just one dessert at the restaurant. Near impossible.
I was whining to a writer friend about the difficulty I was having when she mentioned it could be my lack of focus. That sounded suspiciously like an F word. Those are bad, right? To be avoided at all costs?
Eventually, I found my desperately needed spirit guide, Focus Fox. Had I discovered a trick to make writing blog posts easy? Wow, I could bottle it and sell it. And… Ahem.
While I didn’t make a killing on eBay with my insta-easy sauce, I did discover that I was spending more and more time actually writing. And as I spent more time writing, it did get easier to finish what I started. Never easy, mind you, just easier.
So that’s the story of how I started my blog and ended up with the two different weekly posts.
I feel like there ought to be a moral. Like the sleeping writer never writes or don’t count your stories before they hatch or the watched writer never boils. Huh, I’ll keep working on those.
Claudia Blood is a writer, blogger, and geek living in Rochester, MN. She has a tiny issue with focus and has drafted a fantasy romance called Book of Secrets, a six-part Sci-fi series called Relic, and, strangely enough, a fantasy about a supernatural daycare. When she is not writing, or chasing her two young kids, Claudia works in IT where she slaves away for the man. You can check Claudia out over at her blog, Twitter and Facebook.
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