Habits

Habits are difficult things to break. There are a lot of things I do that happen simply because they’re what I have always done. I have a listing in my internet bookmarks called ‘daily review’. Every time I am on the computer for any length of time I open that list of bookmarks and roll through each of the sites there. I don’t need to see any of those sites. They’re a mix of news, entertainment and web comics that I follow. It’s important to keep up on the news of the day, but there really isn’t a single one of those web sites that I couldn’t catch up with at some other point in the day OR just skip. Seeing the latest “Off The Mark” comic strip is not something that’s going to deeply change my day. I could skip all of them and not really miss anything at all. It’s a hard habit to break.

As it turns out, it’s also challenging to create new habits. Doing good things, making long term positive changes is not easy either. This applies to anything, but it is particularly difficult for me to do this with writing. My writing tends to take a back seat. There are a lot of reasons for this. The main reasons aren’t easy to pin down, but I think the biggest are lack of inspiration and fear of judgment

Writing at the level I really want is work. I tend to write when I am inspired. When I have that spark the words come pouring out. I have pages and pages of hand written notes with almost no scratch outs or edits. I become the Zeus of the story and chunks just pop from my head fully formed. The problem with that is combining inspiration and the actual time needed to sit and get all the words recorded. There’s at least a novel worth of words that have faded away because I couldn’t manage to get them to the page when the dream was fresh or the mood was in full swing. I can’t afford to wait on these pages. I need to sit and write and keep it all in some kind of recorded form, whatever that form may be. Typed, handwritten, voice recording – doesn’t matter. Get the words out there and do it all the time.

It’s easy to hear others talk about these things. I know that Ray Bradbury used to write ten thousand words a day. Sounds like the perfect recipe for writing books. I’ve often snatched a line from one of my other favorite authors. When I heard Jim Butcher talk about writing he said, “I don’t have a muse, I have a mortgage…” I knew there was truth there. Writing is work. Work needs to be done on a regular basis. I do not do enough of that kind of work.

Judgment

The other part of my inability to start good habits is this fear of judgment. If I put myself out there and claim to be a writer I will be judged by my ability to string together coherent statements with the proper use of grammar AND it will all need to be spelled right. Then, after all the basics, I need to actually have something to say.

Two main parts to that. First the spelling and grammar portion is not easy. I am terrible at spelling. I can look at this page alone and see at least 3 words with squiggly red lines under them. They are words that I absolutely should know how to spell and I just can’t seem to get them right. I don’t know why, but they don’t stick. It’s physically difficult for me to keep typing and not go back to edit while I’m letting the words continue to come out. Going back to edit can and should be something that is done after all the words are out. Too often I stop what I am thinking to go back and craft the perfect phrase or clean up all the spelling that is glaring at me in red. Breaking the flow stops the words and just as often as not they don’t start again. Grammar is worse. Grammar is one of those things that I know I should know, but I feel a bit like Gandalf in the LOTR movies, “I have no memory of this place…”. I am faking my way through it all and anyone that has half a clue about how grammar works probably cringes at the word salad I toss out.

Impostor

The second part is the judgment All this writing is out there for people to read, and very few people actually read it. The fact that I can name the people who interact with me when it comes to my writing says a lot about my success. That’s the true judgment part. It’s not having some troll throw angry words down about what I have said, it’s that all of this amounts to nothing. Getting somebody to react, somebody to actually read what I have labored to create would allow them to look at my terrible spelling and grammar and think, “this guy is a writer? I could do better…”. One of the harshest critiques I’ve ever had was at a book signing. The book signing had a line of authors from the anthology. As people shuffled along the line of authors this guy asked me, “and what story was yours?”. When I told him his face froze in place and then he said, “Oh. That one was… nice.”. I thanked him again and he stepped down the line to the next author. That really sucked. He’d read it and it did nothing for him. That was a tough one to overcome, but I’ve kept going in the hopes that I’ll sneak in with the cool kids again one of these days. It’s not easy. I am slowly slipping into the land of old men standing in the yard and yelling at the sky.

After all that

This is the sort of rambling, writerly life-style post that would normally end with some promise not to blog fade or to use the coming new year as an excuse to claim great changes are on the way. I’ve done all that before. I’m sure I’ll re-post one of my successful habits in the coming days about that. What I am going to say is that this is all a work in progress. I have seen some short videos lately that have resonated with me about habits, work ethic and the tool box fallacy. I’ll keep going. In the future somebody will dig these words up and bring them back for judgment – at least I will have made them react.

Post Script:

This is one of those “fully formed” examples. More than a thousand words that poured out all at once. Now to edit…