Writing is a choice. It takes effort to sit your butt on your chair every day. It takes courage to move pass bricks and blocks and superficialities and safe talk. It takes a phenomenal amount of patience to wait for a response. You need a healthy dose of self-esteem to endure the inevitable onslaught of rejection: no response or worse yet, a negative one.
So the one thing that can help you get pass the difficulties is to ask yourself why you write in the first place.
For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It lets out the uglies. But it also frees a few beauties too. It allows me to understand and process what’s difficult. It gives me purpose and aligns me with a greater good. And it does all these things when I write purely to write.
In How the Light Gets In, author Pat Schneider beautifully depicts the writing process:
“To write about what is painful is to begin the work of healing…To write grief onto a page of lined paper until tears blur the ink is often the surest access to giving or receiving forgiveness. To write a comic scene is grace and beatitude. To write irony is to seek justice. To write admission of failure is humility. To be an attitude of praise or thanksgiving, to rage against God, or to open one’s inner self and listen, is prayer. To write tragedy and allow comedy to arise between the lines is miracle and revelation…Writing is for me the surest way to find out where I am and to open the gate to where I might go next.”
The next time you’re stuck or blocked, ask yourself why you write? Do you do it for fame, success, notoriety? As a form of paycheck? Do you write to enlighten, entertain, engage others? Do you write to leave your mark on the world? Or do you do it to understand what can’t possibly be understood right now-to know what you don’t yet know about yourself?
I write because i was told I can’t – being dyslectic I was always told in school that I was less then a student, a wait of time, some one that could not learn. In many way that was true….I did not learn in conventional way, reading was abstract and took hours to understand a point. Yet, listening and my imagination and inquisitiveness tough me more then any book. Still, it have taken years just for me to be able to construct ideas into words and meanings. My mind goes faster then I can type or spell. What may take one person to write takes me 4x’s longer. But I love the art and thrill of a good story. So, when I’m block – I remember all the people that said “I can’t” -then I do… Or as a cartoonist I’ll just draw a cartoon, i hear they are worth a thousand words. 🙂
Hi Chato! Thanks for stopping by my blog. =) I think it’s great to use others criticism as fuel to write. You’re doing an awesome job as always. It’s pretty amazing that you found your niche through continuously working through your own personal challenges.