I’ve come to this realization after rather accidentally giving myself a three week hiatus from producing anything on my novels. It began when we went on vacation, and I left my flash drive with all my current WIP’s at home. D’oh! This really put me off stride, though I decided that maybe actually vacationing on my vacation wasn’t such a bad idea.
Shortly after we returned, my computer’s power cord went on the fritz, leaving us down to two computers in a house with five users… and none of the computers was mine. Took a week for the new power cord to finally arrive. And now that it has, we’ve entered April and I’m just now finally sitting down to work on something. Being that it’s April, I’ve had to move on to yet another WIP, this one The Wizard of the Sky Pirates. I spent part of yesterday familiarizing myself with the story, and today I finally sat down to begin seriously working on it.
And it’s hard.
I find that I’m tired and that it’s difficult to concentrate, that getting into the story makes me want to do a thousand other things (like write a blog post).
In short, it feels almost exactly like what happens when I go too long between work outs. All this fatigue and lack of focus is not anything purely physical (like with working out), or is it purely mental (like dealing with writer’s block). It’s volitional. This is the pain of self-discipline, of overcoming laziness and inertia. I suspect this kind of reaction takes place in almost anything that might require self-discipline, whether it be writing or working out or finances or prayer or cleaning house or anything. We come up with all kinds of labels and definitions and, frankly, excuses for what amounts to the same thing: resistance to self-discipline.
But here’s the thing: I know I can write in huge chunks. Like I know I can exercise. Like I know I can do any number of things. So the trick is to turn aside the excuses and concentrate on my goal.
Right after I finish this blog post and refresh my coffee… 🙂