Moving Merrily Onward

Okay, maybe not so merrily. I feel clunky and uninspired still, but I know that will go away once I can get myself back into a normal routine of writing regularly. Meanwhile, while I work toward that routine, I am slow and sludgy and draggy. And yet...And yet there is a story building in my head. It's a Greenvale story--Greenvale is my made-up city on a bay on the shore of the Pacific and has a university and a lighthouse and a thriving art community. It's a great place even mostly unformed as it is now, and a few of my story nuggets are going to be Greenvale stories.

So I am still left with the question: Why am I so resistant to writing? I can't stop thinking about writing and my stories. My head is filled with all of it all the time. So what's the problem? What is holding me back, keeping me from actually doing it? I think there's a lot of worry that once I really try I'll find out I'm not actually good at it. I've had positive feedback in the past on both my fiction and other writing, including from professors and other teachers. But I find a quiet, whispery worry in the back of my mind that warns that those situations might just have been flukes and that I won't be able to repeat my success. That whisper is accompanied by another that tells me that my years of not doing a lot of regular writing have probably dried up my talent so I have nothing left to actually put down on paper.

I don't think those whispers are actually telling me the truth. At least, my rational mind doesn't believe them. But I am somehow letting them thwart me even though I know they lie. Part of my plan to overcome them is to keep writing about all of this here. Maybe someday this will even be useful to other writers and creatives who are caught in the same sticky trap.

Now, though, I am going to do one thing. I am taking one step. I am going to post this and then get out my Lesson 5 papers and finish my D&L. By tomorrow, I plan to be able to write here that I'm ready for the next phase.

Fingers crossed...