Journals and diaries don’t have to be sacred. There doesn’t need to be a ritual or a format. It doesn’t have to be good. You can just fuck around.
I say these things in my head as a way to ease off some of the pressure that I put on myself to write. I’m often afraid to start. The fact that I got out a pen and started writing at all feels like a victory. That I am now typing this out into a blog post is another one.
I’m writing with no motive and it feels fun. Inviting, easy, like hey it’s okay, write what you want.
Tuesday felt like a remarkable day. I woke up and instead of going right back to whatever TV show I was binging the night before, I got out of bed and made coffee, turned on the radio, and finally picked up the book I bought four months ago that I’ve looked at on my coffee table every day since it came in the mail and thought maybe today is the day I’ll read this and then didn’t. But Tuesday was really the day, I sat in bed and started reading and before I realized it the sun had gone down. It felt good and productive to read a book, even if reading is just another passive act of consumption similar to watching television. It still felt like I was doing something.
Writing shouldn’t be hard to do. Reading shouldn’t be hard to do. An activity that I enjoy shouldn’t be hard to do. It’s so much easier to lay back in bed and watch Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares than it is to sit up and open a text document to write in or edit, even if I’m guilt tripping myself because I know I’m wasting time. But I can’t stop procrastinating, and then I get frustrated with myself about procrastinating. I keep calling myself lazy but I think my reluctance to begin tasks is actually my depression wrapping its twiggy fingers around me in an act of restraint, and the negative self talk isn’t helping.
I’m writing a novel. It’s the same novel I started back in 2017, except in the past couple years it’s become something new entirely. I haven’t really worked on it since August, but I always think about it. I dream about it. I always think about the story and the scenes and the characters and how I can make it all feel more real and more true to my vision. There’s a lot that I want to do with the novel and I’m scared that I won’t be able to turn the ideas I have in my head out onto paper. I psyche myself out of opening the Word document.
I don’t want to fail, so I just keep thinking about it, as if the more I play the novel out in my head the better equipped I’ll be when I get back to writing it. I tell myself that I need hours and hours of time to get into my groove and feel like I’m in the novel, and I need a bumper day in between working my day job and working on the novel to decompress and prepare myself mentally, but I’m probably making excuses for myself.
If I can write a blog post, if I can read a book, then I can work on my novel. I just have to keep reminding myself of that.
This post
originally appeared on the author’s website
and appears on the
talk about it
substack
as part one of a new series on writing.