You start a blog and promise yourself that you’ll be doing an article a day, well, except on the weekends(me time), you promise yourself that you’ll nurture your baby until it comes of age and is able to walk on its own. We all start somewhere don’t we? You read somewhere that perfect practice makes perfect, the first two days are easy enough, you chug articles after every few hours and post them. You don’t edit your work, at least for now. Look, you’re not really a sucker for perfection, you want your baby to be rough around the edges, if it were a real kid you’d want it to be the easiest kid to socialize with on the playground, you want it to be the cool kid who has seen more life than the other kids. You want it to be the kid who folds his sleeves and tucks in their shoe laces instead of tying them like kids their age.
Ideas you’ve been stacking up for ages peter out of mind as soon as you grab your laptop to put something down, you blankly stare at the cursor blinking mockingly on your word document, as if taunting you to come up with something worthwhile that can fill a page. You are just from a weekend and you have not put anything down for days now yet you need content for your blog, by now you are trying to tap into all your brain’s willpower. Have you ever tried to come up with something creative? Tried to tap into your creative side and nothing comes to mind? And you just sat there, depressed, wondering if you really had a brain and why the hell would your brain disappoint you at such a scale. (Teeth grinding emoji)
An idea pops up and you try to quickly jot down a sentence hoping more of them will suddenly follow suit, three sentences down the line, you realize your article is headed nowhere and is as dry as they come, words stare at you like dry twigs, uninspired. You highlight the whole six sentences and hit the delete button on your button and continue staring at the blank word document, you can feel your baby already yawning with hunger or boredom(by the time I write this it’s had a total of zero reads/visits), you can see its ribs already showing. You must try and bang up at least 500 words for the day(talk of, keeping the bar really low)- you finally decide and write about your shortcomings of ideas, call it your writers block.
Three hundred words down the line you can feel that you’re already pushing your ideas beyond their limit, you’re nudging each word after the other hoping they form a sentence, discretely catching a glimpse of the word count at the bottom of the word application. Look, your blog is just a couple of days old, it’s still weaning, its yet to grow some teeth, you will not allow your blog to face the same fate as your long deceased passions, you are willing to push this newly found love as far as you can, you try and lure more and more words into your article. Your baby is must survive, it means a lot to you.
You have been going through an identity crisis and you feel that words are the best way to express yourself, If your ‘creative well’ runs dry and your blog dies then you will have to look for another hobby and that takes time and will, the latter of which you will not have because all your past hobbies have suffered the same fate, death at infancy, low mortality rates. By now you are riding on a writers high, more like a runners high, your article has already surpassed your weak target.
It is ready to be served.
Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins.
“You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up, you get into the habit of writing everyday so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop of that b/@#h”
Lili St Crow
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