Writers get writers’ block. Happens to everyone at one point or another. It happens to some writers every day. Take me, for example. I struggle every day.
Thanks to a recommendation from an old friend, I’ve been reading Steven Pressfield’s really great book The War of Art, which talks about resistance and how we as writers get sucked in to the war of Doing Anything But the Writing That is Most Important to Us.
Resistance, as Pressfield calls it, comes in many forms, including but not limited to: fear, self-doubt, self-dramatization, victimhood, isolation and general unhappiness.
Today instead of writing, I watched Bugs Bunny cartoons and Marvin the Martian came on to say “Resistance is futile!” And for a cartoon character hell-bent on destroying the planet to get a better view of the moon, he’s right. Resistance is a waste of time and energy.
My eighth grader studying for her vocabulary quiz was right, too, when she said: “Stop watching TV and go do your work. You’re cranky.”
Vapid. Indolent. Putative. Predilection.
Purview. Epiphany. Hackneyed. Taciturn. Unrequited.
A portion of my eighth grader’s vocabulary list. Take five of these words and incorporate them into whatever form you’re tackling today – poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction. Take on the challenge of doing a writer’s work. A little bit, every day.