There’s always a load of laundry or something on TV or a book to read or any number of other diversions that prevent me from sitting down at my desk and actually doing what I truly love to do – writing stories.
When I am at work, I long to be at home writing but when I
am actually in front of my keyboard outside of work, I go into a state of numbness
where I apparently lose all memory of what I intended to write about. I end up
on Facebook, checking my horoscope, catching up on emails or tidying the piles
of paper on my desk.
Yet, when I sleep, I dream my stories. When I drive, I think about my stories. I see
my characters everywhere, I eavesdrop on conversations and revel in what people
talk about every day, I see my stories like mini movies in my mind. I have
notes everywhere – on Post It notes, on random scraps of paper, in one of my
multiple notebooks but combining these notes into actual stories is apparently
just outside of my reality.
Romance stories, young adult stories, short stories – they
are all there, just waiting to be released.
What gives, I wondered? Why don’t I actually write more
often than I do?
I came up with any number of reasonable reasons and excuses:
too tired, not focused, too busy with day to day things that needed doing,
etc.
But the real reason is simply that I haven’t been
assigning my writing the importance in my life that it truly has. When I
actually did sit down to write, I was dismissing it as an indulgence and
therefore a luxury I didn’t need to be spending time doing as often as I
honestly wanted to. I was treating it as if I didn’t deserve to write unless
the ten things that were dancing around my head that I felt needed to be done
first were done.Well, I have decided phooey to that.
I breathe, dream and live my stories every day – inside my
head while the rest of my life goes on. Getting those ideas out of my head and
into my computer is the only way my writing aspirations can come true. I do
remember that occasionally and have great waves of hours and hours of writing
but when life around me is busy or I am tired or winter in Alberta seems to be
never-ending, I forget.
Today, I remembered again why I love to write and why I have
to write.
It’s as much a part of me as breathing. I would never
consider not breathing - therefore I need to write as much as I can, when I
can, where I can, and while I can before my ideas dry up and atrophy.
It’s good to be back.