For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty
of writing takes place in the act of not writing.
It’s the procrastination, the thinking about writing
that’s difficult.
Adam Mansbach
If you write, then you’ve been here at one point or another. It’s the procrastination that’s difficult. What holds us back? Is it the fear of failure? Is it the lack of ideas? Don’t even know where or how to begin?
The key is just starting. Write in anything about anything. It doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t have to be good, but writing anything is better than writing nothing. Eventually, the muscle memory will take over and you’ll begin to write without all the angst. It happens. But first you’ve got to put the pen to the paper…or is that the fingers to the keys?
To help with what to write about, I’ll be starting up the Creativity Prompts again. Look for them on Fridays. In the meantime, check out this post on How To Spark Your Creativity with Prompts.
I so agree! Stephen King also said ‘The scariest moment is before you start’. I think it’s like that for a lot of things in life!
You’re so right, it is like that for a lot of things. We build it up or put so much pressure on ourselves that we freeze. Thanks for stopping by.
Set up a space at home, in the spare room with books and laptop, etc, so I can pop in there and do some blog/research stuff. This stops the procrastination (most of the time). 🙂
That’s all we need, a place to perch. I don’t have a spare room, so I work in the living room, surrounded by my stuff.
Thanks, Jennifer. That fear is real and oh, so true. I am a big procrastinator and my biggest critic of my own writing. Thanks for the reminder to just do it!
What causes us to procrastinate with writing is the fear of our inner critic tearing everything apart before we’ve even gotten it on paper. When I was young I could barely write a word without editing it on the spot or worse, editing it before it even got on paper. It wasn’t until I started doing morning pages and got I to the habit of not looking at it that I was finally able to relax a bit and allow the writing to happen first and the editing to come later. Not a perfect science, but most of the time it happens that way.
Dear lord, this is so dang true. I’d never thought about how much worse the anxiety during the procrastination period is compared to the anxiety of the actual writing period. This really helped put my blogging schedule and my schedule for my term papers in perspective!