Struggling to Write

I’ve been struggling to write blog posts recently. Since posting Century a few weeks ago, I’ve started many posts but not finished any. I have periods where I’ve got four lined up and just about ready to go and when that happens I tend to procrastinate. What I should do is write a few more so I’ve got even more up my sleeve… but I don’t. Just before I published my Mum’s recent post I had nothing ready. She emailed me on the Thursday morning and I pounced on her copy, edited it quickly and then told her it was going out the next day.

I had been scrabbling around with a few opening salvos and then deleting them and starting again. I couldn’t get myself going. Mum’s post saved my bacon. And then the next week, my friend Emily sent over her piece and boom! I was saved for a couple more weeks. And here’s the weird thing. There’s tonnes to talk about. Lots of shite going on at the moment that I could get exercised about or good things happening. But I just couldn’t get started.

Once I’ve got that opening paragraph written – the one above the logo – I always feel like I’m on the right track. I can write that paragraph and then leave it a couple of days, come back to it and I know where I want to go and what I want to write. And that opening may change throughout the course of writing the post, but it’s presence means I can get going with my five hundred words. One of the reasons why I wanted to write relatively short pieces was because I didn’t want to inundate you the reader with a massive diatribe about what I think and feel. I wanted to cut out some extraneous stuff and get to the important shit.

Also I’m lazy and writing five hundred words is relatively easy for me. My fingers can rattle on the keyboard and by Thor I have a blog post. Hopefully keeping it funny, relevant and interesting. And recently I’ve struggled to light that typing fire. I spoke to my good friend Jo (who has kindly written for the blog in the past) about it. And I said to her that I’d been struggling and I was going to write a post about struggling to write. And she replied with ‘everything is copy.’ And I suppose she’s right. Ooooo that was proper meta.

This post will never be my best (sorry) and it probably won’t get read by many, but it has been important for me to write down that I was having a hard time with writing and I was struggling to get the motivation to write. Important that I spoke to someone about it and published my small issue. So as my five hundred words come to an end, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for letting me prattle on for a post about how I’m finding it difficult. And if you’re finding something difficult, I would recommend talking to someone about it. It’ll help, I’m sure. More from me next week.