A Little Every Day - Week 4
This week my motivation to write was at an all time low. I am saddened to admit that I failed to do my 15 minutes one day this week, but I am not letting that get in the way of building this habit. Just because I failed once does not mean that I will have to abandon the project. No one is perfect and no one can do anything every single day without building up to it. I am so proud of myself for getting all the way to 28 days without missing a single one.
This week was a really hard one for me in terms of my motivation to write. My attention has been divided and I have struggled. I was simultaneously working on a job application, excited to sink my teeth int the new Binding of Isaac DLC Repentance, and generally exhausted. There are times where writing is easy and requires little to no effort, except for searching for the right words and physically moving the pen. Other times, like this week, it feels like an uphill battle, when creativity is finite writers block becomes a real issue.
It is the challenge of the writer not to imagine and depict the cornerstone events and character development scenes but to connect them and stage them with the more mundane elements of life. This has been my struggle with Chapter 10 of the novel. The events of chapters 7 – 9 were easy to write, they were those which I could picture vividly in my mind. Acts of heroism and self-sacrifice, masters of their crafts putting their skills to the test, people bearing their souls to their companions. Chapter 10 by contrast has begun as if a bank of fog has descended on the story and I am blindly traversing it with a vague idea of which direction I am headed. Yet, the destination is blindingly clear, its detail is fine grained and defined in its significance.
This week I have stared at the page, I have tried editing a previous chapter to get the creative juices flowing. In the end I only managed to get a few pages of the Chapter written. However, I am striving to remember that a few pages are a lot better than not trying and not getting anything done at all. After all, progress is still progress, no matter how small.
Towards the end of the week I focussed my efforts on a job application. It isn’t every day where your dream job (or the beginning of the career ladder to it) becomes available. To work in publishing has been a dream of mine since I was a child. Whether as a writer, editor, librarian, or something else entirely; I have found myself drawn to books and the production of them. That is why I spent my free time for four days this week working to demonstrate that I tick all the boxes they are looking for in my cover letter, CV and finally a pretty unique requirement, a miniature book review. The tricky part for me wasn’t the writing of the book review but indeed that I hadn’t read a recent release which was specified. I could ask friends for advice on my covering letter and get their opinions on how it was coming across but I couldn’t google the right answer or take someone else’s opinions for my own in the review. In the end I did the best I could in the time given and I can only hope that it is enough.
Thank you for joining me on this journey and reading the latest weekly recap. I hope to produce more content for the website the week coming. See you again soon!