An Awkward Bout of Writers’ Block

I’m not going to lie, things have been tough lately. Not in any particularly worrisome way, just, well, I feel out of sorts. A bit frustrated, very tired and all that sort of thing. When these emotions come along, the first thing that changes is my ability to write. Simply put, I have a massive case of Writers’ Block which I am struggling to escape from.

No patience to write

While I do have some free time, free time does not equal writing time. Free time can be spent on all sorts of things, like watching Youtube videos or attempting to draw. I try to vary what I do with my free time, but lately, my writing time is, well, not great. Somehow, I’d write 1000+ words in a day, but currently, I am only just managing doing 500.

Okay, sure, I can hit that target. But my writing needs to either be a blog post or a story post. And blog posts are of higher importance than story ones. After all, I run a website called The Daily SPUF. Someone has to make sure we hit one post a day.

The biggest problem though is that I have no real patience. Normally I can churn an article out quite easily. But these days? I have a Drafts section that keeps getting bigger. Even if I ignore all the unfinished stuff our contributors wrote in the past.

I simply lack the patience to write something half decent.

Too tired to write.

At the same time, well, I’m tired. Exhausted even. Between my own health, my job and my brain, there is so much going on that I can hardly actually focus on my writing. And many times, I have considered not writing, only to push that feeling to one side. However at the end of the day, I just have to force myself. After all, I’ve been doing this since Jan 1st 2016. It’s a long time and I don’t want to break that new year’s resolution.

Doesn’t help that I’ve changed keyboards quite a few times lately. I am still not used to my new one, and it’s taken me a while to get used to it. So not only is writing hard to do, but it’s full of typos as well. If anything, the typos bug me more than anything else, because I often second-judge myself and make more typos. At least I have a keyboard, I guess. This one makes nice, clicky noises, while the one I had previously didn’t like me pressing more than three buttons at once.

“Why not just stop?”

Whenever I bring this up, pretty much everyone replies with the same thing. “Take a break”, or “do it later” or whatever. But the thing is, I can’t. I’ve made my 500 words a day into part of my life. I feel horrible even considering stopping. I just can’t. This is my life now. And I’m going to keep on writing, no matter what.

I’ve been doing this for so long. I can’t stop, I have to keep on going. After all, my writing is part of who I am, it defines me in a way.

Ironically, I just wrote 500 words.

Sometimes, the creative juices just don’t flow. But rarely, after sitting down and whining for a while, I do eventually manage to write something here. Even if that something isn’t very good. As long as I manage to write something, I do somewhat feel better afterwards.

Another day, another 500 words. As things should be.