Hello, writing community! Welcome to May, which seemed to appear out of nowhere. Then again, the first two days of May have been overcast, rainy and cold, so it’s like April never left. Or March, for that matter. Then again, the COVID pandemic is still kind of hanging in there, which means today (Wednesday, IWSG day) is March 794, 2020.
Anyway.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2022 is:
It’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times. What are your writer highs (the good times)? And what are your writer lows (the crappy times)?
My writer highs come from being in the zone, or in the flow, as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. There are moments in the mornings when I can knock two concepts against each other in my head and from the interaction and intersection of these agents I can pull a page or so of short story, or a new scene for a novel, or the seed of a poem. These moments never seem to be predictable, but they always seem to happen within the first few minutes of a writing session. Which is to say, if I make it more than a few minutes into a writing session, that is the time when I am most likely to achieve the flow state and in that moment I am no longer writing, I am transcribing. I feel like I am in harmony with the world and the words are writing themselves.
The lows are the mornings when I am sleep deprived and still burned out from the day before, and my pen seems too heavy to hold, and someone broke into my house and rearranged all of the keys on my laptop. Or so it seems while in the grip of the ennui which is so easy to fall into and so difficult to pull myself out of. I’m feeling a touch of it right now, coming after a month full of reading and writing poetry, and attending poetry events and talking to poets. I should feel great, but instead I feel friction. I want to write, but I don’t want to write. And petulance looks silly on someone in their mid-fifties.
So the only thing to do is endure the down-times and have faith that the good times will appear again, hopefully soon, and I will be able to get back into the zone.
The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.