I wish I could say I was good at this.
When I started The Late World, my goal was to post something inspirational every week — maybe even twice a week. I wasn’t thinking they would be full-on essays, but rather something manageable and, you know, easy.
As you may have noticed, my last post was almost a year ago.
What happened?
Well, since my mother passed in 2009, I have had a pretty regular experience of writer’s block. For a while, in the first couple of years after she died, it got so bad that I couldn’t even write longhand. Emails and grocery lists all went by the boards, and for a couple of years I lived as a mostly aural and oral being, with no writing at all.
Things have gotten much better, thankfully. But there are still long stretches of time where I get eaten up by this un-named, un-attached anxiety. I just feel overwhelmed by the simplest things. When that happens, I have to be very choosy about where I put my energy. If I don’t I get burned out, and quickly.
Over the past fifteen months or so, I have been focused on a number of writing projects associated with my work. For a while, I was writing grant proposals. Then (thankfully) I was also focused on revising not one but two book manuscripts. As all of those projects have demanded my attention, I found the smaller writing (like this blog) had to go on hiatus. I just didn’t have it in the tank to keep up.
But I have missed it. I really enjoy thinking (and writing to you) about the creative process. So I keep having this tug to come back.
But then I don’t.
So for most of the summer, I’ve been asking myself why that is, and I didn’t really have an answer. That is, I didn’t until yesterday.
So lately I’ve been watching videos about story structure, and that led me to this series by Abbie Emmons about the writing process. This video popped up in my feed, and I clicked on it.
I’ll be honest, I think a lot of the video is kinda hokey and over-earnest. I’ve heard a lot of this self-help stuff before.
But right in the middle, she said something that clicked.
If you don’t feel like writing, if you are blocked, the most important thing to do is to write—with the expectation that it is going to be imperfect, and that it is going to need to be revised.
Okay, sure. That sounds a lot like my basic philosophy of the three rules. If it’s worth doing, do it badly.
But then Abbie said something else. She said that a lot of times we get caught up in worrying about what might go wrong. We get caught up in the fear.
Then she said, do it anyway. It’s just fear.
Fear is an emotion. It’s data about a state in which you find yourself. What you do with that data, however, is up to you.
For years I have been feeling the edge of that fear, that anxiety, and letting it scare me away from the work. The fear has a loud voice, and it echoes off the walls of my skull.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a voice yelling at me. It’s just fear. It’s not the reality of an obstacle—it’s the shadow of one. Maybe not even a shadow, but my idea of an idea of a shadow.
So here I am — again — doing it badly.
Thanks for your patience, and I am very glad you stuck around.
I wonder what I’ll write next.