Monday, November 14, 2005

Stuck... on writing

Once again, I have been remiss in producing a blog entry in a timely manner.

I could go into all sorts of excuses, but this would be quite unlike me.  Instead, I choose what I perceive to be the “truth”:  I was feeling inadequate.

How’s that from someone who is, shall we say, opinionated?

I went to a wonderful writer’s workshop back in October, seems like years ago now.  This workshop was geared towards writing a novel, as opposed to blogs, and it was extremely instructional.  Little did I know that I would revisit some of my own writings afterwards and find them wanting.

This is not surprising in itself, as we are often our own worse critics.  What I did not expect was to lock myself up.   A few days after the workshop I polished some of the work I had done and published it here: the Halloween poem and the book review of Isaac’s Storm.  Shortly thereafter, I was simply unable to move ahead with my next subject matter, which was about statistics and lies, if I remember correctly.

Not that the subject wasn’t of interest to me, quite the opposite, I was itching to wax pejorative about the low unemployment rate bullshit.  I may yet publish on this, as I have a place-marker in my blogger dashboard.  I even found good slamming fodder in the recent news on TV and the Ottawa Citizen.  But none of these events sparked enough juice to get me writing.

I had to turn to my motivation again.  This is something that I have yet to expound on, but is a recurring theme in my life.  I want to treat this subject with the importance it deserves, so I won’t do so here, it’ll have it’s very own space.  

My research into not writing, yet wanting to, yielded fear as a by-product of incompetence.  Upon revisiting my work, as I mentioned earlier, I was hit with how much improvement it could stand. Not that I didn’t put in my best effort in first publishing here, au contraire, but looking back at what I learned, it seemed that all could stand more editing.  This is normal. The more often work is revisited, the better one can perfect it.  

But then fear started creeping in, and what-if started rearing its ugly head.  I can produce some thoughts to paper or computer screen.  I can edit to a degree of understanding.  I can publish these thoughts in blog-form.  But what-if: I don’t have any subject to write about any more?  What-if, editing takes 5, or 10, or 20 days?  What if I’m not satisfied with the result, and not want to publish it?  What if …

So I had to read my own blog-entry on fear again, just to shake me out of it! Then I found much editing to be done even on that blog entry!  Arrgh!

What-ifs can paralyse, as fear, but they can also be an indicator or even a trigger.  The strange truth is that if we lock up on something, being stuck in psycho-parlance, it inevitably means that we have something to address before moving on.  This is my philosophy anyway, after years of therapy:  there is no “stuck”.  Stuck is a state of being that signifies one is not addressing something by ordinary methods.  Being truly stuck means we’ve had a go at resolving the conflict but have failed to find a way about.  It also means that we may need new tools, or a new outlook, or a new set of parameters to tackle this newly found problem.

So to me “stuck” is simply an indicator that requires me to change my thinking.  Note that there is nothing simple about changing ones thinking.  I tend to analyse the shit out of everything, this is my natural way of tackling things.  So when I am setting out to change my thinking I have to, at the least, limit analysis and use something else.  For us control freaks, this is very challenging.

I declared that I was locking myself up, and I have analysed this in the past few weeks and have not found a solution.  Hence I now declare the trigger pulled and the hammer down: Thinking about it will not help.

Low and behold, writing about it… just might!  

So I did.

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