Writing for Yourself When You Write All Day

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I’ve discovered something not so great about writing, Tweeting, Facebooking, and Pinteresting for other people. I’ve become like the cobbler whose children had no shoes; only I’m the writer whose stories have no endings. Or middles.

I’ve taken to working on my projects in fits and starts, only to become bogged down in work-a-day projects and end up exhausted and playing solitaire at the end of the day because my mind is too trashed to pound out even a paragraph of crappy dialogue.

So now I’m down to figuring out how I can just write something, anything. To this end I’m starting by “just writing something” to post to my blog, which has languished for months.

I follow a lot of wonderful authors who are busy writing, revising, traveling, touring, and giving talks. I know that for most of them there was a time when they had to scrounge even a few minutes a day, before or after work, when the kids were finally in bed or before they awoke, to squeeze in a few paragraphs on a favorite project.  Those who have gone before me are the ones that give me hope that if I just keep trying there will come a day when I’ll be in possession of a completed and polished novel.

What will I do with it when that day comes? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I don’t want to bother with the struggle to find an agent and a publisher. Other days I imagine myself sitting at a table at Comic-con signing my very own bestseller.  I guess the truth of the matter is that as long as I keep trying anything is possible. After all, following a 12-hour workday I managed to write these five paragraphs . . .