Pushing Through Resistance

Welcome to my new weekly blog post where I’ll be reflecting on my writing process and keeping myself accountable as I re-establish a regular writing practice.

While the entries will be spell checked they’ll also be fairly ‘raw’ as in they’ll be my immediate thoughts on my writing life. I’ll be posting weekly on Tuesdays and would love you to share your own thoughts and writing experiences in the comments so we can keep the conversation going and perhaps help inspire and motivate each other. You'll find all the posts under the heading Notes on Writing under the Categories tab.

The backstory to this post is that I'm currently contracted to submit a novella at the end of January, have a novel half written and another in the planning stages. None of which will happen if I don't get my butt in the chair and write.

Tuesday December 20

So, only two days into my new writing regime and I’m already feeling resistance.You know that ever so slightly nauseous sensation and the barely-there tension rippling through your body as you think about doing something you want to do that has the potential to be out of this world exhilarating, but also the possibility that it could reveal your deepest inadequacies, and prove you’re the failure your inner critic declares you to be?

That was me, standing at the kitchen sink, scraping toast crumbs from my plate as I contemplated this morning’s writing session. There was no particular reason to feel so nervous. Yesterday’s writing session went pretty well, and moved the story forward even though I didn’t get as many words on the page as I had planned. Sure, I was 800 words short of my word count goal, but 1200 more than I had when I started, right?

Not according to my critic. According to her, that deficit is reason enough to not even bother: You couldn’t even stick to your plans on Day 1? How do you think you’re going to get to 10K words by the end of the week? (cue evil laughter).

She’s right in one sense. My new ‘plan’ is to be up at 6am, grab a cuppa, do a short yoga session then head to the desk and write 2000 words. By the end of the week I’ll have 10K words and one more week after that I’ll have a full draft of the novella. Despite my best intentions my plan didn’t exactly come to fruition. After a crap night’s sleep I hit the snooze button too many times and only managed 683 words in my first writing session. But adopting Sally Hepworth’s ‘nifty 350’ word count philosophy I returned to my desk later in the day and reached a total of around 1200 words. So even though I didn’t get all the words done, and certainly not first thing, I was still ahead.

And what did you do this morning? Hit the snooze button again and failed to do anything before the farrier arrived at 7.15am? You’re hopeless!

That critic loves to grab a fact and run with it! But the thing is, I have a deadline and that other more sensible (kinder) me knows that if I don’t apply some bum-glue I’ll be feeling more than just slightly nauseous. At the end of January I need to have something in the publisher’s inbox – something worth reading. So, after this draft is done I’ll be spending most of the month revising. And I need to create a full draft to revise. Besides, my characters need me. Without me sitting here tapping away at the keyboard they’re going to stay only partly formed and won’t be able to evolve into the ‘people’ they have the potential to become. If I don’t write their story how will I know what happened to them?

Plate now in dishwasher, I’d managed to talk myself around. So what if my schedule isn’t exactly going to plan? The priority still needs to be the writing and as long as I get the words down some time during the day, that’s all that matters. From experience I know that the more I get down before other work and life commitments kick in, the more chance I have of reaching my goal. So, even when there’s resistance I must push through. Get the words down at whatever time of day I can (preferably morning) and write in batches if that’s what’s working.

So, here I am, thoughts sorted, fingers at the ready, about to hang out with my characters for a few hours and see where we end up.

Until next Tuesday...

PS: Today's word count was 1055 words.

Nowhere near 2K!

But better than nothing :)