The Jester currently has writer’s block. I admit I’ve been distracted lately with work, my mental health, and my personal relationships, and that has impacted my ability to focus on my writing to some degree. Over the past few weeks, I told myself that I would dedicate some time to my creative writing over the weekends, but this is the first day in a couple of weeks that I’ve been focused enough to sit down and attempt to write something creative.
So I figured instead of trying to force the flow of creative inspiration, I would just take this time to write a “Blogger’s note” to the reader. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, I absolutely love it! I guess my hesitation comes from not turning out good content which, again, is one of the reasons I don’t want to force it. I want it to come naturally, but I know that will take practice.
When I envision my future, I usually imagine myself as a blogger. A successful blogger. I know that’s not going to happen overnight, but I do believe it’s possible. I’m creative, and I like writing so it just seems logical to want to start a blog. Sometimes I just get hung up on what to write about. That’s one of the reasons I’m happy that I started my own, independent blog. If I feel like writing a creative story and I’m inspired to do so, I can. Or in other instances, such as this one, if I want to directly address the audience and share my thoughts or insecurities about writing, I can. There really are no rules when it comes to working on my own blog.
There are days that I’m desperate for creative inspiration. More frequently than not, I get random goofy thoughts that I can usually turn into a story, but lately, maybe due to those aforementioned distractions, I haven’t been able to concentrate. The good news is, I’m not putting too much pressure on myself and that helps. Another good thing is that this is a real-time experiment. In other words, I’m learning as I go. That makes this more enjoyable in my opinion.
One thing that I learned that helps me focus more is being out in nature. Sometimes, I’ll just sit at the park and that helps me to refocus. Another thing I learned from other writers, as well as my own best practices, is writing ideas down. For me in particular, I like finding a nice notebook or journal to write my notes down. I like to think of the notebook as an extension of my brain. Here are some nice notebooks by Dynta that I bought a few months ago because they are colorful and I love color. (I actually bought the notebooks in a bundle because I wanted to give them away as gifts, so they could work for that as well, I suppose.) One last thing that I can think of that helps me with my writing is reading the writings of writers. A really good book that I read is by the great Stephen King. It was a while ago that I read it, but it offered some really good insights into the mind of a writer and made me feel encouraged to keep going in my own venture of becoming a writer. Here’s the book. I highly recommend you read it if you’re interested in learning about writing: Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”.
I guess having writer’s block is a part of the process. Does that make me a true writer if I grapple with writer’s block? Since writing makes me happy, I’ll keep at it and see how things turn out in the long run. That’s it for now. Until next time, thanks for reading!