Dear fellow writers,
Steven Pressfield* says an artist’s resistance is like a dragon we must tame every morning.
A reader commented that Steven King writes joyfully every day, perhaps because he puts his dragons into his stories.
Is that the answer?
Since this is called a Writer’s Blog, perhaps I have been remiss for not talking about writing.
I have written almost daily for years and joyfully. Only recently have I experienced any resistance. I have felt that writing is my expression, my art, a way to be creative. (I believe everyone is creative—just find it and do it.) In creativity we find that No-Time-Zone where angels sing, birds chirp, and you are driven away from the computer (or canvas, or keyboard) only when starved or needing a water closet break. (Isn’t that a fantastic term?)
There at my desk, I happily put words on a page, thought up stories, read for fun and research, and all the while tried to get better.
(Pressfield wrote a book titled, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t.) We will write it occasionally, forgive ourselves, and move on. Hey Pressfield, that was not our intention.)
Maybe that’s my dilemma—I’m reading too much good stuff—stuff better than mine, or I feel I “should” be doing something that helps pay the bills. I feel guilty that I’m not calling Real Estate Leads. (I have a real estate license) One rejection after another gets tedious after a while.
(I did get hold of a fellow horse lover, a cowboy, and we had a good time, but he was not buying or selling, just fishing for information.)
Why don’t we do the thing that will make us feel better? I’m guilty of it—maybe that’s the dragon. That’s the resistance. I know that writing “Morning pages,”(Julia Cameron’s term) works like magic. So why don’t we do it? I know that meditation helps the mood and the blood pressure, so why don’t I do more of it? Time? Right, like we’d rather wallow in misery and let the cycling mind run amuck rather than spend 15 minutes writing out the junk we’ve accumulated.
We, you, me, I’m throwing us all in the soup. Morning pages are for your eyes only. It’s a mind dump. It is clearing out the debris so the real stuff can come through. It’s putting a period at the end of a sentence, something the mind tends to forget. Pressfield says we need to clean our house so the Muse doesn’t soil her gown on the way in.
Morning pages are for your eyes only, it’s writing out the sh*t, it’s taming the dragon, it’s cleaning the house.
*https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/Steven+Pressfield/FMfcgzQXJGnzBbKjnHxWPjHpRFxGlhhR
