I've said it now

Sunday 26 January 2020

If I can write every day – even just a few paragraphs, then I’ll be making progress. I haven’t written properly for a long time, and there are lots of reasons of course, but all of them are just excuses. I love to write, and by not writing I have let a little piece of me deteriorate. Same with song-writing – not just the lyrics, but the music too.

I got stuck in a rut for a while, I have to admit. But my life has changed so much in the last two years – I’m out of that rut, and now I’m looking around at the new horizons. I have not changed my life so much that everything is different, but I can most certainly spend time now doing more writing, and – if I can motivate myself to do so – playing more music.

Last year was untypical to say the least with my partner’s cancer treatment pretty much occupying the whole year in various ways. I did write a bit about our experiences, but it was a different kind of writing – writing to share something intimate and challenging, and to share to help others as well as ourselves.

A blog without a photo is boring.
This is my favourite pine tree.

Cancer treatment has finished, and hopefully Sheena will continue to get stronger and better now that the cancer has gone. But the side effects of the treatments (which only stopped this month) need some recovery time too.

Back to the start of this – that I want to write every day. Writing is like any muscle, you need to use it to keep it strong and flexible. So, I’m limbering up – getting ready to launch back into exercising my writing brain beyond the daily use demanded by work, or the occasional blog.

My plan is to write a novel. Oh yes, everyone has a novel in them we know, but do I have a story, and a loose plot, I just need to work on characterisations, structure and then simply sit down and write. It doesn’t matter if what I write isn’t good enough – it matters only that I write. The more I do so, the more I will improve. I will also ask for critique from those whose opinions I value, sure of their honesty.

If you have a goal you want to achieve, what do you do to pursue it? In a recent training course (which has prompted me to do this), one of the recommendations was ‘affirmations’ – saying out loud to yourself what it is you want to achieve. One colleague put it really simply, “I’ve said it, so I’ll do it”.  I like that.

Hence this rather boring, but important to me, blog. I have said it. I will do it.

Other blog posts related to writing:

Thesisa

Troublesome angels

Time management

Postscript - having looked for a photo to illustrate this post, I think I just might write something about that tree next.

(C) Carolyn Sheppard