Cult of Observation

 

On Douglas Adams, James Burke, and the People Who Taught Me to Notice.

This essay started the way so many of mine do. With an observation that leads to one of my patented wandering conversations.

Is a writer still a writer if he isn't writing?

For the last year or so (if I'm honest, nearly two years now) writing has been far more difficult than it should be. By writing, I mean anything that requires putting words in a cunning order. Be that blog posts, letters, novels, or really anything. I managed to complete NaNoWriMo 2017, but it was torture and well, quite poorly written. For NaNoWriMo 2018 I never got past 14k words. 

I have always considered myself a writer, not because I had published anything or because I was always writing something, but because I loved writing. Whenever the opportunity presented itself I would write happily away into the night. whether it was instructions on some process or system for work, a letter to someone, a short story, a blog post, or anything the words just poured out (not always good, but easily). This is no longer the case.

NaNoWriMo Once and Again.

Last November I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and was a winner. This was the first time since I was in middle school (7th grade maybe) that I had completed anything I had started writing. 

NaNoWriMo FTW!

So, NaNoWriMo went well. I managed to hold it together for the last week and in fact finished a couple days early. Well, I passed the 50,000 word mark early, I made some changes to the ending a few times right up to November 30th.

Where do I go from here.

As I am sure the one or two of you who read this blog with any regularity have noticed I have not posted in quite some time now. The single largest hurdle to writing for me has always been the idea. Once I have an idea I can generally write three or four blog posts but without that idea, nothing else works.

Writing in a coffee shop.

Normally I write at home after the house has gone to sleep because it’s quiet and there is nothing else requiring my attention. I tend to do my best work late in the evening, I don’t know if it’s because of the minimum amount of distractions or simply because I  am a night person and naturally more effective at night. Recently though - for probably less than a month - I have been writing during my weekly coffee klatch on Saturday mornings.