Writer's Block

I was conferring with a friend (and fellow aspiring writer) recently about how things have been progessing with our respective fiction writing. In short: slowly. We discussed what tends to inhibit our creative juices, and I was reminded of just how many roadblocks I erect in order to avoid sitting down and following-through with putting pen to paper (so to speak).

For decades, I wrote a fairly copious amount, mostly short stories. This is because a young man whose only real obligation is grade school, middle school and high school does not suffer from a lack of time. I was never one of the 'in crowd,' so popularity and all of its busy trappings was never an issue. Even during college and working to support myself, I led a mostly solitary life. There was time to write.

These days (and for the past ten-plus years), life has been busier. There's been a long-term relationship, working for a living, greater time spent with friends, and a four-year term spent on a local governing body that ate into certain weeknights and required agenda reading on the weekends. In short, my writing fell by the wayside. While my job isn't necessarily rocket science, it does sometimes drain me mentally. I find that sitting down and thinking-out a coherent plot (and then writing said plot) is one of the last things I feel like doing. Therefore, several unfinished stories languish in the archives of the word processor, awaiting my next, erratic visit.

I recently took a Franklin Covey course on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was to help sharpen and hone both work and home/social skill sets. One of things it advocated was to take ownership of your life, and instead of saying, "I have to do [x]," or, "I don't have time to [x]," instead say, "I choose to do [x]," or, "I choose not to do [x]."  The psychology of it is spot on.

So, writing has long been a passion of mine. Of late, it has been a neglected passion. When am I going to choose to do it again?