This is my October contribution to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writers' Support Group. There’s a lot going on with IWSG this month. To read other participants, click here. Also, The IWSG Anthology
Contest is open until November
1. For details, click here. Last but not least, be sure to check in with this month's co-hosts:
I'm going to be dead honest. Writing has felt like slogging through cold
syrup for me lately and I have to force myself to sit
down. If I get 200 words written, it’s a
victory. If I get 500 words, I’m ecstatic.
Monday blog posts roll around and I don’t know what to write. Even as I type this post, I’m trying to formulate words, something inspiring, something
to help those who read it. But I don’t
have anything. No caveats, not even a
platitude. Pretty much dead air.
To give myself a jumping off point, I opened Stephen
King’s, On Writing, and read a descriptive paragraph about his childhood tonsillitis.
Didn’t help. I paged through Writingdown the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. That
book delivered creative prompts back when I was a unemployed, newbie writer scribbling from my seat in a downtown bakery. It didn’t work with this. Next, I glanced through Write to be Published, by Nicola Morgan, and Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maas. All these books stirred me at one time or another, but for the moment, it all seemed like a lot of bla, bla, bla.
Finally, I opened Walking in this World, by Julia Cameron,
and found this quote by Publilius Syrus.
“It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.”
It reminded me. The
path is long, and sometimes it does feel like slurping barefoot through a mud
bog. But, success is about wanting
excellence bad enough to take the time required to cultivate it.
I might be a hundred by the time I get there, but God help me. I'll keep slogging.
