Exercising
Finding the motivation to write is sometimes the hardest part.
Personally, I would argue that writing is a lot like going to the gym. When you do it often and regularly, it makes you feel great. You’re mind is clear, you feel more motivated and you’re ready to go back for more. However, if you stop going for a week, the sluggishness takes over and you find that it is that much more difficult to make youself interval-jog at 7 AM.
There may be some readers who find such a statement odd. Shouldn’t writing be like this incredible experience that just flows from the writer? All that a scribe has to do is sit at a desk with a pen, typewriter or keyboard and they’re off! I think that this view is rather uncommon, if not implausible all together. We don’t all just free write with an inner monologue like Carrie Bradshaw.
I’d argue that most writers don’t experience that easy of a time when they write at all. In fact, I think that for most writers, writing is a lot of work, and if done right, kind of painful. To bring us back to the gym metaphor, and probably not unlike what the mind actually is, writing is exercising a muscle (not that anyone hasn’t heard this before, but some may have not, so work with me here). And no, I don’t mean your hand . When writing, one uses their brain similarly to how a person works out their biceps with a set of free weights. And if you’re doing it well, you’re upping the weights and getting more strength out of it. Yeah, the finished product looks great, but it takes a hell of a lot of work to get there.
And I guess the point of this, was to re-exercise my brain. Damn does that feel better.
- Spider