Tag Archives: Writer’s Plight

The 5 Stages of Rewriting

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Insanity

There is perhaps no truer mark of the insanity of writers than the fact that we are inherently and embarrassingly compelled to express ourselves or display our creativity in writing even when there is no one around to read our carefully chosen, optimistically published words. It’s akin to some poor inebriated sap muttering to himself in a dark and lonesome alley somewhere. Or is that just me?

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Photo by Connor Fisher on Unsplash

I Write, I Fight

If I’m writing then it means I am most certainly fighting. Fighting what or whom? Many opponents, to be sure. Mainly myself and the four dees.

Distraction

First, there’s any manner of distractions — time spent with family, time spent on consuming various media (news, music, books, TV shows, movies, comics, etc.), time spent on essentially living a normal life as a social creature (as oppose to the life of a  hermit).

Doubt

Then there are the inevitable, practically omnipotent voices of self-doubt and uncertainty. The doubt that I’m the writer I believe I am and the uncertainty that I can pull off whatever grand vision I’m attempting on a given day. This is only with regards to writing fiction, of course.

Discipline

But let’s say I somehow conquer and vanquish the above — well, then there’s the fight to achieve and maintain discipline and attention to the writing task at hand. That means avoiding new ideas that inevitably spawn while working on a current idea. And somehow avoid going down the rabbit hole when using the Internet to research this or that subject.

Devotion

Yet all the above aside, it ultimately comes down to the one thing I can’t (or shouldn’t) fight which is my devotion to my family. Our family is still virtually young and there’s simply no way I can completely forsake them for a hermitic, reclusive and selfish activity such as writing, especially long form fiction, which is why I semi-joke that I’ll be at least 50 years old before I actually finish writing a novel (yeah, yeah, I can hear professional writers now saying “Well it looks like you’re in the wrong business if you can’t make that selfish sacrifice” — maybe they’d be right, at least for now).

So, yeah. If I’m writin’, I’m fightin’.

Boxer
Dude looks just like me. Minus the gloves 😉

A Certain Amount of Delusion

~ The Evening Muse #8 ~

Like most writers I constantly battle with confidence and the lack of constant validation (especially since I’m not publishing regularly anymore), but I’ve come to realize that one way to battle that is to simply adopt a certain amount of delusion — an elevated sense of self and ability as a writer — a delusion of grandeur, if you will. Essentially just have a belief in self that may not even be true, but so long as YOU believe it, that’s all that matters, right? It goes along with the old adage that “If YOU don’t believe in yourself, who’s going to?”