Being Your Own Worst Enemy
Apr. 17th, 2008 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alanajoliI was having a conversation with my chiropractor yesterday and talking about my writing. In response to my saying something about how I was delaying on a project, she made the comment, "Well, don't be your own worst enemy."
This struck me as pretty sage advice. There are a lot of moments when I'm the only person standing in my way--and yet, I still stand there, just hanging out on the path to success and not going anywhere. (Or, at least, the path to accomplishing something with my day. Success is subjective, after all.) I've been trying really hard to follow![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amieroserotruck's excellent example, which I blogged about last week, in writing at least one sentence a day. To be honest, it's not a fun way to write. But rather than sit down and write more than a sentence or two, I read books I've been meaning to read, work on other projects, and generally do other things that get in the way of my progress. It's not that any of these are bad decisions--and everyone deserves a little time off now and again--but they are decisions that keep me in the struggling stage with the new WIP.
At any rate, today I'm going to start trying to stop being my own worst enemy, starting with getting on top of that project I talked to my chiropractor about. And who knows? Maybe tomorrow I'll write a whole page. ;)
This struck me as pretty sage advice. There are a lot of moments when I'm the only person standing in my way--and yet, I still stand there, just hanging out on the path to success and not going anywhere. (Or, at least, the path to accomplishing something with my day. Success is subjective, after all.) I've been trying really hard to follow
amieroserotruck's excellent example, which I blogged about last week, in writing at least one sentence a day. To be honest, it's not a fun way to write. But rather than sit down and write more than a sentence or two, I read books I've been meaning to read, work on other projects, and generally do other things that get in the way of my progress. It's not that any of these are bad decisions--and everyone deserves a little time off now and again--but they are decisions that keep me in the struggling stage with the new WIP.At any rate, today I'm going to start trying to stop being my own worst enemy, starting with getting on top of that project I talked to my chiropractor about. And who knows? Maybe tomorrow I'll write a whole page. ;)
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Date: 2008-04-18 02:50 pm (UTC)I'm not yet sure whether this new strategy has been useful, but as Shawn mentions a couple comments down, I tend to sit down to write a sentence and then write five or six. There's part of me that's really glad that I'm doing this, because if I weren't, I'd be "waiting" for a block of time between projects to show up--and I suspect I'd never get started. What I'm hoping is that this pattern turns into a drive to work on the project, so that instead of "waiting" for time, I start making it. Because that's really the only way it's likely to happen.
There are far too few occurences for me when I *have* to write something down. The last time that happened was the beginning of a short story I have yet to finished; before that, it was for "Nomi's Wish," which I wrote the first, 5,000 word draft of in a single evening. (It has expanded quite a bit since then, but the initial story changed very little.) When I don't have that compulsion, there are a lot of things I can do instead of writing--like working on projects with deadlines, or, to be fair, playing video games. And, because I'm at that struggling stage with obligations vs. excuses, I often choose to do the Other thing, whatever it is.
At any rate, it's an experiment, and I like the sense of progress (even at a slow pace) better than having nothing. I just don't like it as well as those days when I *have* to write, because I can do nothing else.