Writing writing

There are some days where I can just sit at my keyboard and type and the words come out fine.

Then there are the days when sitting at the keyboard is absolute torture and I can sit there for hours and nothing productive happens. (I might fritter all the time away looking at things I didn’t know I wanted before I knew they existed. Not productive.)

I have found a few ways to break this block, though.

I stop forcing it, get up and go for a walk, or just do something quite different. This helps a bit at work. I go and see what colleagues are doing. Or stand up and stare out the window for a bit. Or go have lunch. Or review my To Do list. (This can have a galvanising effect, along the lines of: “Eeek, so much more to do, better get on with it.)

Often I find I am agonising about how difficult the task is going to be, or how I am stuck or going to get stuck. Obviously I don’t want to do it. This is, I find, the hardest thing to combat. If I can avoid thinking too much about the writing I need to do, that’s best. If I do need to plan or draft things, again, best to not think about it too much – better to put pen to paper.

And this is where my favourite activity comes in, when I need to work out what I want to write: I pick up a pen and a notebook, and start writing things down. (I do do this on the keyboard too, but there is something about the pen and paper thing that I particularly enjoy.)

When writing, it is of course ALWAYS a fountain pen, and recently I have found some paper that is absolutely delicious to write on, and I find that I’m actually looking for excuses to sit and write on it. I actually WANT to write becauseI love this paper¹ so much.

Swapping tools (keyboard instead of pen or pen instead of keyboard) really works well for me.

Thanks Alisa for your Writing Mojo post which inspired this one.

¹It’s Japanese paper from the Melbourne stationer, Notemaker.