Prompt: What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it? (Prompt Author: Leo Babauta)
There is an implication in this prompt I find a little scary - ie that you should live purely for your writing, or turn all you do into creative fodder. That sounds a bit too extreme for me. Maybe that is because I am not a serious writer. Maybe its because I have become cynical over the years. Maybe its because I think that balance is more important.
I go through phases when I feel like I need some kind of creative exercise to stop my mind freezing up. Right now it is this Reverb doohickey. Before it was doing drawings and paintings, and pretending to be a Mexican finger puppet living in a kneepit world of corruption and sadness. Long before that there was music and films.
This creative urge is not daily for me by any means, and since my son was born it is rare that it has even crossed my mind at all.
But I know it is there, somewhere inside me, as it probably is in all of us to some degree, and it feels good to let it loose once in a while.
So to answer the original question - I do lots of things that don't contribute, and many more which make it practically impossible. But within all that I know that if I really want to write, and can start to enjoy it for the sake of it (rather than for the hope that someone somewhere out there will like what I do) then I will make the time somehow.
Right now what I really need to eliminate is the fear that I have nothing worth saying, and my own laziness.
I also need few more good prompts.
After all, we all need a good promting every now and then don't we?
1 comment:
Okay, here's a prompting. I understand what you mean about worrying you have nothing worth saying. I can relate to this and for years stopped myself from writing from this fear. I think it's actually where the laziness comes from - it's a sort of cover for our fears. Anyway, I don't know what finally convinced me, but I found that shifting the focus away from worrying that I had nothing to say to just writing, to see what I might actually have to say - was more helpful. It's a bit like a process of discovery. Even if you have an idea of what you want to say when you start, you don't know exactly where you're gonna end up and often, where you do end up and what you find along the way is what makes it all worth it.
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