Freelancing to Freedom

The dreaded blank page and flashing cursor. Every writer knows what I’m talking about.

The last thing in the world you feel like doing is writing. When you’re feeling unmotivated and uninspired, there’s nothing harder than trying to be creative. So don’t. Just write. Even if you just get a random rambling of strings of sentences onto the page, it’s better than nothing – that’s what editors are for :).

My dad was my English teacher in high school – I get my word nerdiness from him (although he’d probably argue that “nerdiness” isn’t a word). In his creative writing class, we did exercises in freewriting. Each student in the class, all eight of us, wrote down a bunch of words on little pieces of paper and threw them into a hat. Then we each picked out a word and had exactly five minutes to write about that topic without editing ourselves.

I’m an editor at heart, so I found this exercise very difficult the first few times. But I was amazed at what was hiding deep in my brain – writing just for the sake of writing was extremely liberating. So turn your conscious brain off and tune into the unconscious. Who knows what’s lurking deep in the shadows.

And if your lack of motivation isn’t related to writing, use the same principle. Go with the flow. Stop thinking so much.

One step at a time, one word at a time. Just keep swimming.

This week’s goal: As you can tell, I didn’t write about last week’s goal of thinking long-term and getting excited about the short. Let’s go for round two.

Song of the week:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmyUkm2qlhA

Unmotivated? Or just gathering inspiration? More likely none of the above and totally tuned out – ah, the ocean.