Life Demands Your Attention? Don't Write...

 

Yes. You read the title right. A blog solely dedicated to making you write every day is telling you NOT to write.

Hey, I told you I'd be weirdly honest. Okay, I may have not used those exact words... although, by now, I'm sure anything you get from me falls into the weird category. And I'm disturbingly honest, so there.

Back to the show...

Yes. There are times when you should not write.

If your life has been bombarded by other, more crucial, events, responsibilities, the last thing you need to do is avoid those demands by escaping into your writing world, "escape" being the operative word here.

Like anything else humans use to avoid difficult times or duties, writing can become a crutch, too. It can be as detrimental as alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc., if you use it to escape the crucial moments in your life.

Last week, I had some important duties to complete. They were stressful, mentally exhausting, but necessary to finish in order to sustain my quality of life. I could have ignored them and dove, headfirst, into my manuscript... cloaked in a huge sweater, hood up, avoiding the world.

And yes, words would have gone down on the page... but at what cost?

Those life demands would still be there when I came up for air, and my quality of life could have been damaged, preventing me from writing in the future, so where's the point in escaping???

Writing should be a synthesis, a celebration, of life, not a distraction from it. And the difficult tasks you need to do, those unique experiences, WILL end up bubbling their way to the surface in your future works that will weave richer tales.

My favorite saying, "You can't write on life if you don't live life."

HOMEWORK: If you have things that need doing in your life, DO THEM. And when they are done, then return to your literary world, knowing you didn't try to escape anything, using any crutch. Your guilt meter won't erupt off the Richter Scale, and your contented smiles as you hack away on that keyboard will be genuine.

Life IS hard. 

I wish to God my parents had clued me into this fact when I was 6. At least then I could have better prepared to educate myself for a permanent job of Barbie-doll testing at Mattel.