Monday, May 19, 2014

A blog a day keeps writer's block away

Palm Street Films is supposed to announce their semifinalists today.  I’m trying not to check my email every 5 minutes but that just leaves me clicking on their website instead.

I find myself once again at the crossroads of what to write next.  It’s not a question of not knowing what to write but rather choosing what to write next.  It’s wonderful.  In a difficult choice sort of way.  The hard part, of course, is that I’m about to invest hours of my life in a project.  It needs to be a good project or I’ll be wasting my time.  There’s pressure in that sort of thing.

The wonderful part is that I’m not struggling to figure out what I could possibly write about.  There are too many things.  In fact, I’ve even combined some of my ideas together into super-ideas and yet still there are too many possibilities to write them all.  It was not always this way.

I used to write only when I felt like it.  Or was especially inspired.  Or had to.  That led to unfinished work, unstructured gibberish, or wracking my brain for something – anything – to fill the page with.  This blog changed that.  Daily writing.  Facing a blank page.  And filling it.  You learn to manage.  To cope.  To write.

I have been surprised, many times, when a post that I wasn’t particularly impressed with generated praise.  Of course I had read that just because the words flow doesn’t mean they are great and vice versa – struggling to put it down doesn’t make it bad.  Actually seeing it over the last year has been a big push for me.

My professional writing is also better.  It’s tighter.  If I need to keep my blog post under 500 words, why can the memo be just as short?  And clear, free of game changing, paradigm shifting, outside-of-the-box jargon that defines modern business correspondence?

Why indeed.  There is more to being a writer than residuals.

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