Write here, write there.

I am a pen waiting to be unleashed on a piece of paper expressing the writer's need to create life and landscape out of thin air. I get close to the Creator by creating myself and by emulating the process of dreaming up and purposefully planning where everything in a story has to go. When I feel a block, I feel it completely and earth-shatteringly and when the flow comes, it comes in abundance. I write here, because the pen wants to...I write there because the story of a stranger in the street is too captivating to leave unwritten.

The Process.

I rarely write about my writing, or my inspiration for writing or my reason for writing. I felt it necessary this time however, because the sporadic utterances of my creativity had me thinking...and where most of my thinking ends up is in writing...and where most of my writing end up is in my blog. You then, the reader, have this front row seat this time in one of my creative dump sessions paired with a thorough complaint of 'why I never get time to write.'

Firstly, it's not that I don't get time to write, I just don't make time. There are plenty of opportunities throughout a given week where I could make time to blab on a random free Wix website, but I mostly just 'feel' too busy to take one of them and simply blab.

"This is bullsnart," I think as I complete yet another mundane and routine task in my day, "I should be out there painting pictures with words and killing off villains in my latest novel."

That's the start of the process. Then I usually need to do something in the Important-Urgent quadrant of my life (Thanks Steven Covey), when the inspiration for how the said killing of the villain should take place, appears to me. That's step two. Step three is the inevitable return to my actual work, with a half written page on Word left to mind it's own business until The Process occurs once more.

The Planning.

The only time I actually got real snart done is by purposefully planning writing sessions and setting writing goals with people who kept me accountable. It seems counterintuitive to 'plan' creative time, but trust me, it's the only way my book got published (after three years). To be able to write or be creative (or whatever you've been putting off) it doesn't take the monumental effort we think it does, it takes the discipline to plan small and intentional sessions to spend time on this thing. What helps is to look at the goal and reverse engineer it into something like a 5 minute session. What I found was then, is that if my brain knows every Tuesday at 17:15 I am going to write for 5 minutes, it actually prepares some pretty cool gems to write about beforehand.

The Product.

'Perfectionism kills the writer' - no one, but someone should've said it, because it's true. If I ever take on my writing projects with a perfectionist mindset, I never get done, every single time. With your projects, no matter what it is, to aim for perfection is going to make the whole process way more grueling and much shorter than you planned. I am confident that 'I will start on Monday' was born from a perfectionist in Sandton somewhere. To get the final product or the final goal, just start, continue and complete whatever you set out to do...no matter what the outcome. If the process looks different than you thought, or you feel different than you thought, good! That's how it is supposed to be, welcome to Life. The key to getting to the product phase of our plans, is just to get it out there, that's it.

So, thinking of painting a Picasso to put above your kettle? Stop, and do an original You. "And then?" You ask. And then you finish it, by painting 5 minutes a day and then putting it up. Every time you boil water from then on, you will look up at something most likely imperfect and full of flaws, but guess what? You will be looking up at SOMETHING, and that's better than nothing...true story.

TF