The Beginning of a Writers Lament

I’m up early and I hope that is a good sign. There’s a lot on my mind and old projects buzzing around my head wondering if I’m ever going to get to them. There seems to be a particular level of energy that I have to exert to get to some of these projects that I’ve promised to someday complete. Any way that’s the way it looks this morning. But then I think that it might have something to do with ambition and writing. By that I mean a desire to write overrides everything else. When I think about it, nothing else matters that much to me, except for my writing. I really want nothing else in my life and I see nothing else but my writing. But then I languish over the writing so terribly, scrutinizing every word, every sentence, and every direction that I move a plot. It certainly must be some kind of mental illness than I’m dealing with. What else could it be?

Yesterday turned out to be a terrible writing day. I think that I managed to get a couple sentences written but then that may be an exaggeration. Possibly I only deleted a couple words, shifted a sentence or two and then read and reread the two pages of that new fourth chapter. I’ve heard of artists going mad from dealing with their craft, and writers who starve to death in their hovels, canvases and paints scattered about as though at any moment the muse would drop in for a short visit.

Writers are not much different from that. They sit and fiddle with lives and locations of their characters, struggling to manage a tangle of experiences that the characters are supposed to travel through. And then like sand the ideas slip away and refuse to cooperate. The effort to get to the exact point where a story turns and comes alive moves just out of reach like a dream. So here I am again, and I’ve written this kind of shit in my journals for years. How can I break this stupid chain of discontented writing? How can I break free from this strange addiction to an art form? At this point, well it is early in the morning, but I would rather give up drinking wine in the evening than to never touch a keyboard again. No matter what, and that means quite likely even in the throws of a form of dementia in my old age I’ll probably still try to get words out of me in some form or other.

So, do I open the fourth chapter and get it under way this morning? Well, quite likely that’s exactly what I’ll do. Yesterday, I had let myself get carried away with many distractions and then I lost the spirited energy that would have pushed me to that other level, that level with characters willing to deal with the slow development of their roles in my story. But, that’s what I have to do. I have to get to the keyboard every day, and write every day, and keep the faith every day, and let the waters of discontented writing wash over me and then wait as they leave me to do my thing once again.