The writing world is full of stories of the writer who’d written their whole life and never wanted to be anything else. Not all of us are struck with such certainty at a young age.
Many of us have to put the desire aside for pragmatic reasons. Or self-doubt forces us to ignore our feelings and go for a safer route.
We all travel different paths as we approach the page, and each one is as valid and important as the words you write.
Doubt, declare, then get back to work. We’re all waiting for what you’ll write next.
Something I’ve talked about before is my issues with consistency. Mainly, I will have long stretches where I will distance myself from a story and then, whether pressure, guilt, or a newly ignited desire to finish the piece rises up in my gut, I come back to the keyboard and go, “where they heck was I now?”
I’ve had this with each Season of Wound. What started out in 2021 as an experiment to see if I could consistently write and publish a horror serial on the at-then-new Kindle Vella platform quickly ended when I discovered, no, I cannot consistently write and publish a horror serial.
Or anything at all.
My whole life has been a push and pull between half-finished works and new ideas and, from the sheer amount of reading I’ve done about other writers’ processes, this isn’t’ unusual. When I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, this seemed to be a feature and not (necessarily) a personality flaw. So, in the year since my diagnosis and treatment, what have I learned?
Not much? I still struggle with shiny object syndrome, object impermanence, and distraction. BUT I have realized that if I start – literally just start writing a sentence, the rest will come. It may be slow, sloggy, weird, and not quite what I want to say, but it does come.
I also am starting to understand what my triggers are and doing better at avoided them (particular voices or sounds).
My goal for the second half of this year is not a writing goal, but a working goal. I aim to strengthen whatever skills I need to work fully remote (my day job lends itself to this), to make the effort twice a day to start that sentence, and – most importantly – work on being able to come back to the page immediately after a distraction.
I know what I’ve tried before, systems, apps, web sites, etc. But this time I’m going to try bull-headed determination. RAWR!
Do you have a secret sauce to being consistent in anything? I’d love some advice!
