Arrrrrgggh! I’ve Forgotten How to Write
February 6, 2015 § 5 Comments
From the brilliant and funny Sonya Huber:
Setting the Bar Low
I haven’t been able to write lately due to disrupted mornings, which has thrown me off and made me rusty. I have spoken and written about the hour-a-day writing routine, and I want to admit here in the privacy of the Internet that the bar is super low for that hour. Here’s a chronicle of real writing as it just happened:
MY HOUR OF WRITING THIS MORNING
8:30 reply to 2 urgent emails.
8:31: Oh my god this morning pissed me off so much. The battle with my son over his iPod. The freaking diabetic cat. The illnesses. The …whatever. Arrrrrgggh. I haven’t had time to write in days and I think I have forgotten how. Arrrrrrgggghghg.
8:32: Send an essay to be read by one of my writing groups. Stare at my folder of stuff in progress and nothing looks interesting. Resign myself to starting this document. Hating everything including writing.
8:34: Move two folders from “in progress” to published to clean up a bit. Then move one more. Then add a pub to the file of my list of publications.
Read the whole post (and the full hour of writing time) here.
The Brevity Blog 
Sounds like my writing time these days…
I have the same issue; so I often start the day with a rant…like this one:
I haven’t written anything new in months…which means I haven’t written anything. Instead, what I’ve done is upload stuff I wrote 3 years ago. This stuff moves faster than sound, faster than light, and finds its way into your computer…faster than you can blink.
Have you been sitting at your computer wasting time? Waiting for ME to write something? Wasting air? Have you been Googling, following or stalking your prey while the fridge hums and the taps drips? Have you been waiting with your personal, hand held social status device, for a sound, then some words that tell you everything will be alright?
While you’ve been waiting for them, I’ve been wanting to write them…see which happens first.
Delay ending it all for a minute longer. They say good things come to those who wait, and absence makes the heart grow fonder. But there’s an abscess on my heart. It’s not growing, it just appeared one day. The same day I saw my last butterfly and the same day I noticed that everyone was looking at something else, which ended up being the same thing, which was never real in the first place. Holograms aren’t real and freedom is only real if you understand exactly what it is and not the various 10,000s meaning that it has accumulated.
Ranting is easy when you’re feeling shit about yourself. Listening is hard, when people just want to talk about how shit their lives are. Watching TV is hard, when everything and everyone on it looks like a future nightmare painting in plastic daylight wearing someone else’s birthday cake and blowing out candles shaped like your best friend’s boyfriend’s dick. BFBF doesn’t stand for anything. Your phone has stolen your language, your money and your identity. HAPPY NEW YEAR, are three words that when combined, mean absolutely nothing. This has been my rant for today.
Thanks for this, Brevity (and Sonya Huber whose blog I will now be following). Great to read this before I start doing my own morning limbo: just how low can I go?
Wow! Sonya, your “disrupted morning” sounds awfully familiar. Thanks for sharing.
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