Interruptions to Your Writing

Most authors have heard that they should ‘write every day’. I don’t always manage to do it, and sometimes when I do write, it isn’t on my current Work in Progress. I might have a blog post coming due, so I write that. Or I work on a piece for an upcoming newsletter. Typically, these ‘also wrote’ items are not very long, and adding them to my Writing Journal doesn’t make my stats look any good. But it is writing, and so I count it.

But sometimes, something comes along that knocks you right out of the idea of writing. It might last a couple of days, a couple months, or even longer. For instance, last year when my right arm was broken in a car accident, I could not write longhand nor by keyboard for at least 6 weeks. Even then, I had to have weeks of physical therapy to get that arm used to doing things again. But I remember plotting out several scenes in my head while my hand was otherwise occupied, and as soon as I could type again, those scenes flowed out of me easily.

Another example: My hubby was facing surgery this past Monday. All surgery has its risks. Neither one of us got anything productive done that Saturday and Sunday. I couldn’t even focus enough to plot upcoming scenes. But on Monday, after his surgery was done, and he was sitting up and eating his supper while looking for something to watch on the hospital tv, I wrote. Even though I didn’t have any scenes thought out, I wrote for 3 hours, putting more than 1,200 words on the page. Not bad.

And now the worst example. At one point during my first marriage, my then-husband criticized my writing. Not in a good way, he meant to be mean. I gave up writing for 10 years. I wasn’t going to let him be mean to me in that way again. Eventually I divorced him and moved on. And after a few more years, I started writing again. It took me time to get back in the groove of writing, but I enjoy doing it, and I miss it when I don’t get to do it.

Just because you have things crop up that intrude on your writing time doesn’t mean that you aren’t a writer. It’s whether or not you pick yourself up and get back to putting words on pages.