Writers resist writing. Often. And consistently.
Instead of our brain presenting us with a finished story, we get story IDEAS. Our mind gives us some exotic seeds that require months of tending and fussing before they begin to resemble the beautiful blooms on the seed packet. Even then it could require extensive pruning and trimming or even complete repotting before there's anything for the public to enjoy.
With so much effort required, naturally we resist the urge to write.
But writing does not like to be ignored. It's like an insistent gas bubble that has to be let out via a long noisy burp. You can try to put it off, or ameliorate the discomfort in other ways, but in the end, those words will come out.
A blog I enjoy, Erika Napoletano is Redhead Writing, describes writing like this:
Writing, because I must. When your inside asks to be outside, it’s often not asking nicely. Honoring your Inner makes you a better Outer.
I think we'd all agree that the end result is worth it—we all want a better Outer--complete with killer abs and a shapely backside. But the concentrated effort required to get to that point is why we are consummate procrastinators. Just as there's always an excuse to not exercise, there is ALWAYS a good reason for not sitting down to bleed those words onto the page.
Nowadays we have a lot of diversionary methods right at our fingertips, and it's easy to convince ourselves they are things we need to do for our career. For example, you can defer writing in order to work on "building a platform" via "social media" (translation: fart around on Twitter).
But the most important part of writing is to provide an emotional experience for the reader. It's exhilarating when you nail a scene, when the characters you've created delight you with their humor, or when you start to sniffle over a sad moment you've depicted.
Yet it's rare for those events to happen without a great deal of energy drain on the writer's part. It takes more than one attempt to get the words in just the right order, with just the right impact, to express what is in our hearts, and to elicit the desired emotional response from the reader.
Imagine Sisyphus rolling that boulder up the hill every day, knowing he's going to sweat blood in the process, and it's rolling right back down so he can do it again the next day. Nobody would blame him if he said, "Screw this, I'm blasting this sucker into gravel."
Instead, he gives it one more try, unable to do anything else.
Writers are the same way. We know it's going to be tough, so we do everything possible to get out of writing. . .until we finally can't. The words won't let us. The stories keep poking at us, yelling in our ear, jumping to the front of our brains and waving their arms until, at last, we relent.
Our resistance was futile, because these stories are completely irresistible to us. And we are driven to make them that way for our readers.
So, resistance fighters, what do you do to resist writing? How does the writing finally win you over?
