It’s funny what we can learn about writing from other, unrelated activities. For example, I’ve found that canoeing, shopping and learning to play the piano have all informed my writing practice. But little else in my life has taught me as much about writing as giving birth to triplets, twenty years ago.
I just released my very first book, called Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage, and the whole experience has been a huge learning curve for me. Writing the book was of course difficult in itself, but one of the most shocking parts of the process for me has been how much writing there still is to be done, even after the book is finished.
There are guest posts and articles and content for the book’s website and content for my own website — all of which (honestly) seem to be saying the same thing.
Sometimes it feels like the subject is getting tired, and my writing is falling flat.
Sometimes I feel more “blocked” now than I did when I was writing the manuscript.
Yesterday, I quit the story I was working on. I tried to start something new but then hated the new idea and quit it, too.
I go through these periods every once in a while when I hate all my writing ideas. Even writing this post was hard. Every sentence I wrote, I hated. Has this ever happened to you? How do you handle it?
What do you do when you hate your writing?
By nature, human beings are creatures of habit. We stick to what we’re good at it and we like to do what we’ve always done.
Habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.’”And habits are hard for us to give up. That’s why it’s so difficult for us to make a major lifestyle change—it breaks us out of our comfort zone.
For writers, though, habit can be particularly detrimental.
In an effort to win the heart of Zelda Sayre, F. Scott Fitzgerald finished his first novel, This Side of Paradise, at age twenty-three. Truman Capote caught the attention of Random House publishing with his story Miriam, just shy of his twenty-first birthday. When Ernest Hemingway was twenty-six he wrote The Sun Also Rises, and Mary Shelley completed the manuscript for Frankenstein at nineteen. Perhaps it’s just my own insecurities leaving me feeling rather inadequate with this knowledge, but I suspect I’m not alone.
It’s summer. For me, it is an unusual one, full of travels, visiting friends, family, and living on the road. While all this is great and exciting, the question of writing always remains at the back of my mind, awakening my conscience.
How to keep up writing on a summer schedule, outside the normal routine? More importantly, why make the effort of doing it there and then instead of sinking in the adventures and impressions to write about it later on?
