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I’m a terrible writer.
I don’t mean my writing is bad or that I hate my own words. What I mean is that, as a person who writes, I’m terrible: unfocused, confused, inconsistent, and completely stalled. The cursor makes me angry with its incessant blinking and all that immense white space that follows. “Fill me up!” it demands. “Put words on me!”
Bite me.
It’s not that I’m out of ideas or that I hate the ones I have. They’re great! I desperately want to write them. And yet… I’ve still only written 1,500 words this year and all of it was nonfiction. That’s not counting, of course, the well over 2,000 emails I’ve sent on behalf of The Writer’s Workout, the 24 interviews for our open internship position this month, the medical documentation in patient files for that day job I finally quit, and all the To Do lists I keep rewriting. No, that 1,500 is in mailers for WW and blog posts for a side project I know I don’t have time for. I could blame a lot of different things for my failure to produce fiction in 2020 thus far. But I’m still here, staring at this irritatingly peppy blinking cursor, trying.
This series, The Sunday Evening Post, is meant to encourage writers who know they don’t have time, can’t get over that block, hate their ideas, and aren’t producing, but want to try anyway. It’s meant to be a weekly dose of personal reflection so you, dear reader, understand that it’s okay to hate your mental obstruction as long as you don’t give up.
Giving up is not an option.
Despite having not written since… Portion 2 of The Writer’s Games, 2019 (September), I am a well of creative ideas. If your well ran dry, I’m sorry; I took those too. I have projects and Works In Progress (WIPs, for future reference) and yes, a whole journal dedicated to things I want to write when I have the time. I’m on page 67.
That’s the thing they don’t tell you when you decide to quit your day job so you can focus more on your writing: not only do you finally do all those things you’ve been putting off for someday—my bathroom would blind you with how clean it is now—you fill your new time with other things: things you didn’t know you needed to be doing and still, writing takes a backseat. It’s not okay. I am not okay with this. I have to try harder.
Fiction projects: 3
Fiction words this week: 243
About the author: Theresa Green is the co-founder of The Writer's Workout and crime fiction writer.