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Note to Self

A Guide to Programming Yourself into a Writer

Part 2: Keep with the Program

It's been month of erratic weather. Everything from warm spring days to a late winter, and even some scenes from Deep Impact. With all this fickleness on nature's behalf, it's hard not to imagine the fragile human psyche has been less than willing to buckle down to a regime of writing. Not to wager against a willing ear, I would just take a second to ponder how much writing has been done of late.

You may have heard me say this in the past, and I assure you to its impending ingraining. "You are what you surround yourself with." In fact your writing, and everything about it, is also part of this "mirror phenomena". So when we sit down to write, our mind (like the weather) can be hostile and messy, or cold and numbing.

I've stressed it's important to "just do it", to write for the sake of going through the motions. And hopefully this has been working. Hopefully you've set a little goal (i.e. 5 pages a week). And hopefully you've built a small routine about it--your content with your ability to sit down and pout out the words of the day. And in fact you've gotten a good collection of "just doing it" with you at all times.

You may also find, you've started to take on more than just the one notebook. You suddenly find yourself with a notebook for rhyme, a notebook for that screenplay you want to write, and a note book just for notes (ironically), and it makes sense. Dividing things up is a good idea, but I warn you to be careful of spreading yourself too thin.

Once you begin classifying all these different projects, you run the risk of focusing only on what goes where. You become frigid about writing anything bad or, worse, anything that just doesn't fit. It also slows you down. Once you get the brain going it doesn't care what book it's writing in. So let it go, try and stick with one notebook. You can always organize things later.

As for those other people who are still struggling to fill those 5 pages a week, I know a simple "keep at it" may not be enough. Discouragement is tough, since it comes not only from the world around us but from our own inner voice. You need to use discouragement, come face to face with it. Give agreement to those inner tauntings of "you're not a writer" and "it's all been done before". Answer with a "yet" or "but not by me". Heck, better yet, write it down. Battling the inner critic is a wonderful forum to get the brain moving.

Finally, no matter which type of problem you're facing, keep at it. Set your small goal, 5 pages a week, a half hour a day. Pay attention to building your routine, and toward when you write easily, and when things are tough.