No, really, I should be writing

I’m not blocked, I know exactly where my story should be going, and when I do sit down to write, the words that show up, how­ever grudg­ingly, are good ones.

And yet, I logged a grand total of 192 words over the week­end, 5 (yes, five, and that only to ful­fill the Max­i­mum Geek Ulti­mate Writ­ing Chal­lenge demand to write some­thing every day) Sat­ur­day and 188 Sun­day. My man­u­script cur­rently sits at 22,616 words, short not only of my 2k per day pace (30,000 as of yes­ter­day) but even the eas­ier NaNoW­riMo pace (25,000 as of yes­ter­day). I now need over 2,200 words a day to come in on sched­ule for this book.

Before I go into the fol­low­ing, I want to let my read­ers know I already know the solu­tion to my prob­lem. Butt in chair, fin­gers on key­board, write. It’s just like eat­ing less and exer­cise for weight loss; there really is no other way.

But in the inter­est of show­ing what not to do — as ever, it seems my pri­mary pur­pose in life is to serve as a cau­tion­ary tale for oth­ers — and to take cer­tain excuses off the table for myself and other writ­ers, let’s take a look at why I didn’t get much done over the weekend.

Rea­son: Too tired.

Expla­na­tion: I have sleep apnea, a breath­ing dis­or­der com­mon in heavy­set peo­ple, that causes my air­way to close off while I sleep and stop my breath­ing tem­porar­ily. This is usu­ally treated with a CPAP, or Con­stant Pos­i­tive Air Pres­sure, device, basi­cally an air pump feed­ing a hose attached to an air­tight face­mask that forces my air­way open by sheer air pres­sure, like a bal­loon. Fri­day night I expe­ri­enced a tech­ni­cal prob­lem with my mask and rather than get up to fix it, I just decided to do with­out it for one night. As a result of the sub­se­quent oxy­gen depri­va­tion, I was groggy and slug­gish all day.

Why This Doesn’t Count: I gor­ram well know bet­ter, and should have fixed my CPAP. I could argue that I’ve been push­ing myself too hard for the last two weeks and my body was just insist­ing on get­ting some rest, but I’m not sure I buy that.

Rea­son: So much inter­est­ing stuff on the Hulu, Twit­ter, Google News, Instapa­per, etc.

Expla­na­tion: While I didn’t get much writ­ing done, I did spend a big chunk of the week­end, when I wasn’t catch­ing up on TV shows I’d missed dur­ing the week, read­ing Twit­ter, RSS feeds and saved articles.

Why This Doesn’t Count: Do I really need to explain this one? Writ­ing is sup­posed to come first. Yes, the Patriots/​Colts game last night was amaz­ing. No, I had no busi­ness watch­ing it until I had my 2,000 words. Same for Twit­ter, Google Reader and all my other time sinks. I get a lot of use­ful stuff out of those. But writ­ing needs to come first.

Rea­son: Fear of success.

Expla­na­tion: One of the shows I was watch­ing Sat­ur­day instead of writ­ing brought up an inter­est­ing point. The char­ac­ter kept stalling in open­ing his own busi­ness because as long as he didn’t actu­ally try and fail, it was still a dream rather than yet another thing he screwed up. I’ve often felt the same about my writ­ing. Despite con­crete evi­dence to the con­trary (see pre­vi­ous arti­cles about char­ac­ters com­ing up with bet­ter ideas than what I had in mind for them), I tend to think that the sto­ries are bet­ter in my head and that I dam­age them, some­how, by writ­ing them down.

Why This Doesn’t Count: This is, of course, com­plete wooly-​headed bull­shit. I know damn well that the sto­ries improve dur­ing the writ­ing, and then improve more dur­ing edit­ing. Get­ting them out of my head is only the first step in the process. And besides, even if they were per­fect in my head, if I don’t write them down, so what? Who else will ever know?

Rea­son: Expec­ta­tion that I can catch up.

Expla­na­tion: I know I’m capa­ble of 3k days. I know I’m capa­ble of 6k days every so often. So what dif­fer­ence does it make if I take a few days off? I can make it up later.

Why This Doesn’t Count: I’m sure this one sounds damn famil­iar to any­one who ever had to write a term paper. And it’s largely the same rea­son­ing. I know I’m a fast writer, so I can trust that speed to save me later. Although just like in The Grasshop­per And The Ant, this never actu­ally works. Things come up, and Murphy’s Law dic­tates that the closer you get to your dead­line, the more dis­trac­tions you will have. Yes, math­e­mat­i­cally, if I do 3k per day for six days, I’ll catch up on the 21^st at 42000 words. Is that really going to hap­pen? Maybe. Maybe not. But I shouldn’t be in this posi­tion in the first place.

Ulti­mately, none of these excuses mat­ter. Either I make writ­ing my num­ber one pri­or­ity, or I don’t. If I don’t, I’m not going to make it very far as a pro­fes­sional writer. So do I want it, or not?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, this arti­cle is 883 words, and while I’m fully com­mit­ted to keep­ing this blog going, I really should be writ­ing fiction.