progress

This post takes me over the halfway point of my self-imposed challenge. I've managed to write and post something every day for sixteen days so far, even when I've been crazy busy or sick or apathetic. Even if it's just a couple of lines, something's gone up.

I think... I think... it's working.

I started doing this because inspiration has been so fleeting and elusive lately. I've just found myself staring at empty pages or half-formed sentences or bare ghosts of an idea going, "No. Everything in my head is bad right now. I'm just going to put this away and come back to it." And then I come back to it and it looks even worse and I give up on the idea altogether.

Last week, keeping this going was really, really tough. Most days I just posted a few placeholder sentences to stop the project dying. Sometimes that was because I was ridiculously busy and didn't have time to write anything longer or more in-depth, but mostly the placeholder posts followed hours of trying to come up with something interesting, writing and deleting the same sentence half a dozen times, having ideas and rejecting them, looking around my room or my office or my memories for anything that I might be able to wrap up in a nice little word package and drop into Blogger.

Suddenly I had no stories. Everything was too dull, or too personal, or couldn't stand on its own without fourteen pages of back history. I had one thought that I couldn't expand, or hundreds of thoughts that I couldn't cut down. The blank page and I were stuck in psychological warfare. I would try to trick it by writing three different posts at once, and it would mock me every time I pressed the backspace key and then give me a migraine.

Something changed at the weekend. I have no great revelations to share, no moment where I understood what the problem was, and I'm certainly not claiming the quality is any better. But for some reason, it got easier to think in stories. I didn't have to stare at the blank page because I already knew what I was planning to write before I got to it.

It's more than that, though. I've remembered what it feels like to want to write. For some time now "wanting to write" has meant "I wish I could remember how the fuck I used to do this" rather than having a story to tell or anything specific to say, but for the last few days I've been actually excited about it. I sit in front of a computer and instead of listlessly clicking through page after page of time-consuming nothing online, I think, "Hey, I could write!" And then I do, and it's easy, and I like it. I've stopped pre-judging my ideas based on how other people might react to the subject matter; people will either like the thoughts in my head or they won't, and I think I'm just about comfortable with that again. I'm just writing because that's what I do, because that's who I am and how I work and when I can't do it I just don't feel right.

I'm not quite there yet. I know that if I stopped doing the challenge it would still be really hard to motivate myself, and for that reason I might carry this thing on past July. I have a lot of work to do before I really feel comfortable communicating with a lot of people publicly, or before I'm able to write fiction again. That's OK. Right now I'm just struck by how amazingly fucking good it feels to see myself writing and think, Hey, I remember you.