Why? Why do I have such a block against something that is my absolute dream to do? Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, drops the following wisdom in its pages:
There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't and the secret is this: it's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.
Pressfield knows what he is talking about. Until today, I believed my writing had always been terrible, even during the years I wrote with at least some frequency. Imagining the amount of work required to bring even my best writing up to snuff felt overwhelming.
Today I popped a few chunks of text from back then into The Writer's Diet testing website, and surprisingly found everything within the ideal "lean" category. Apparently, with practice I can get better at writing? Who knew?!
Pretty much everyone. For some reason, I keep believing that no amount of practice can lift my deplorable prose to a readable level. I can't let writing continue to feel like such an overwhelming process. I'm going to try a new protocol in the hopes of amping up how often I write and for how long. Each day, I will write one tiny story, or a snippet of one. Just a paragraph would be enough, more if I feel like it. And I'll post my snippets here every few days, in an attempt to remain accountable to this new plan. Working with The Writer's Diet testing site, I will show the transformation of my tiny paragraphs into more polished story snippets.
Here goes!
