I haven’t been a good writer this past year. I allowed myself to be burned out by projects at work, which limited my willpower to edit my book and write these blog articles. At the end of last year I had the opportunity to transfer into my company’s marketing department. This has allowed me to be more creative on a daily basis, this also kept me from being too tired at night to do anything.
Sometime in January I realized that I had the energy and the capacity to begin writing again, but I didn’t do it. I kept saying to myself, “I’ll work on it tomorrow.” I said this practically everyday for four months. I had become out of practice and lazy. Writing and creating my own work is my dream job. I’ve always wanted to be my own boss, set my own hours, and create novel after novel. So what was stopping me? Nothing was, but myself.
Years ago when I first became serious about my writing I wanted to treat it as a part-time job. While I was able to write for hours every night I quickly felt overwhelmed and burnt out. When I finally decided to get back into the habit of writing again I didn’t want a repeat from last time. I knew if I tried to go all out and spend every evening writing I would quickly crash and burn. Not to mention my wife would kill me.
This got me thinking. How many other creatives out there wanted to begin doing something they love but:
- Didn’t know where to start.
- Was afraid of what others would think because they were spending all their free time to doing something new.
To ease myself and my family into a schedule of me writing more I came up with a 20 Week writing plan. By the end, my goal is to be writing at least 20+ hours a week, essentially a part time job.
Today is Week 1 Day 1
The goal for today is write nothing. Simple right? I did this to trick my brain into thinking I accomplished something. I’m sure some of you are like me that made a plan to start a project and then, for whatever reason, missed day one. Discouragement and a sense of failure soon follow. These feelings usually gave me the excuse to give up on the project. So Day 1: Just relax and look forward to tomorrow. That’s when the real fun begins.
Congratulations Michael, it sounds like you have reached deep inside and are making a transition into being more productive in something you love to do. All of us who wish to continually move forward find ourselves going thru this type of cycle. It is not just in writing. I ended up last year in taking the entire year off from my work to do the very thing we are talking about. I am finding that now have the energy you mention, back in my life and am moving quickly forward again. Happy to see you back as I was wondering recently where you had gone. Enjoying your thoughts, David