Home is Where the Heart is…

And the distractions. While I certainly love that I can work in my pj’s from the comfort of my home office where all of my fun pens and notebooks and references are within easy reach, I can’t help but wonder if I would get more quality writing time in if I was out of the house. You hear all the time about how a writer composed some famous novel or poem in a cafe or park. Maybe there’s something to that.

I am not getting nearly enough writing done in a day. Right now, I am lucky if I get anything of real quality written in a day, much less the 1000+ words I was hoping for originally. And when I read through blogs and musings of other writers, I see that they are producing more than 1000 words, while some of them are also working full time jobs. Yes, yes. I realize that a lot of the people I am looking at are also people who have been writing as a career for more than 5 years now. I guess there’s just a part of me that is so ready to be a good writer that I can’t drum up any patience.

While reading through the array of “How to be a better writer” type books I bought, I have noticed that there are two conflicting sentiments that get thrown around quite often. One is that if you are going to be a writer, you need to focus and get off your ass and get ready to work harder than you have at anything in your entire life. You have to be prepared to set your own deadlines and find the time in your busy life to seek out that much needed solitude and write write write. The other sentiment is that writers are creative, fragile souls and you can’t beat yourself up for not meeting every deadline or not hitting every expected word count. Give yourself space and time to develop your craft or you will smother the inner genius. Is it just me or are these two completely different ways to talk to yourself? On one hand, push yourself hard and be demanding. But on the other hand, when you don’t succeed at your original goal, don’t get upset. Can those two ideas really be reconciled? It’s not working out so well for me, honestly.

If I know deep inside that nothing bad will come of me not reaching a deadline, and that I will able to just shrug it off and take another week or two to finish, then I won’t meet that deadline. I just won’t. If I am going to push myself to achieve something, then I have to know that a thorough self-flogging will commence if I do not achieve it on time. This the entire source of my current struggle, because my current attitude toward myself is so negative that I am really leaving myself little room to succeed in the first place. Perhaps my ego cannot handle a self-flogging any worse than the one I’m already giving it. Or maybe I need a geniune, go for broke, kick in the ass. See what kind of a mess I am?

Anyway, I am going to try stepping out of the house and finding a place where I can physically go for an hour or two each day and focus on writing. Maybe I can set a word count goal for my outing and say that I will not come home again until I have 1000 new words in my novel. I have made a list of places to try, and I think I will start tomorrow if the weather holds up. The weather service has issued a “winter storm” warning saying that snow and freezing rain are coming our way. Schools and such are delayed for tomorrow, but I suspect it won’t be as bad as they think. After all, it rarely is, right? So if the roads are travel-able, I will head out to spot #1 on my list tomorrow – the Cary public library. I need to get a library card anyway. I’ll let you know how it goes.