Tell Them...

I’ve completed the workshop I was taking. Turned in the last poem. A poem completely different from most of my other poems, but I like it and the possibilities that’s forming a waterspout in my head, as a result.

The workshop not only improved my writing, but got my writer’s juices flowing. I love the feel of stretching my skills and ideas and feelings. That’s probably the best thing about a workshop or class and a bonus aside from the learning.

More than anything I needed to give myself this gift of this class. It took me long enough, too. I think I’ll gift myself more often, too.

I have found that writers have a truck full of self-doubt. Understandable, too when so often the work is rejected or never seen by anyone besides family or friends who would never hurt your feelings.

You ask yourself if you can call yourself a writer if you haven’t sold anything or at least been published? Are you wasting time? All these thoughts are what I think help cause writer’s block.
Writer’s block is spirit block. Your spirit. You see day go by without feedback, another piece rejected, doubt in your skill. You wonder if you should try to write. Who will read you? Who wants to? You sink into depression and then, you can’t write.

Writing is a job where no one is waiting for your work and nobody cares if you don’t do it, but you.

Don’t allow those thoughts in. Fight them—each and every one with everything you got. Observe, believe, feel and keep your mind on your work. Don’t give your fears fuel by spending time on them. Don’t give your self-doubt listening time. Just keep typing.

Type anything. Type in your journal. Type about why you write, what’s important about it to you. Type something you’ve written before. Write another writer to encourage them. Tell them how terrible it was when the words were stuck in your head and you couldn’t get them down. How you felt a little crazy and a lot sad. Write to them telling them how you didn’t know what you would do if you couldn’t write and that all that really mattered was the writing, not the publishing or selling.

Tell them that even if what you want to say doesn’t end up on the page, that’s what rewriting is for and rewriting is what writing is really about. Tell them that interruptions and distractions will always be there, so you must just learned to write amongst them. Tell them writers must and should persist. Tell them all writers (even Steven King) have had doubts, but he writes on despite…Tell them that writers write in spite of all that. Tell them… like I’m doing now