I’ve had some extra time to myself this week to travel a bit and, I thought, get a TON of writing done. The traveling was busier than I thought and not nearly as conducive to writing as I would have liked.
My last night in the hotel, and I’m telling myself, “I really need to get these few things written so I can move on.” But I’m tired and overwhelmed by all the work, and all I wanna do is crawl into bed and watch a movie. I’m preparing to do just that, when my internal drill sergeant kicks the door down inside my head and tells me to get to work.
You can belong to a hundred writing groups. You can have the most supportive spouse or parents or cadre of sympathetic friends. But in the end, writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and the words. No one can do the work for you. You either write or you don’t.
There are no magical secrets to getting the work done. No spell books on Amazon. No speak-easy back rooms on the dark web. You simply sit, and you write.
There are no experts or trackers or sacred gurus at the tops of the mountains to guide you. Everyone must hack their own path through the jungle. Because this is a Jumanji jungle. It’s alive. And it grows back around you and chokes out the path, making it impossible for anyone else to follow you.
So this is me, over here hacking away, trying to make sense of the landscape. My machete is dull. Sweat is stinging in my eyes. Strange bugs are crawling in my ears. But there’s no easier way. And the path behind me has already grown over.
You are so much better at getting that creative time in than most. Certainly better than me.
I felt that in my bones. Thanks for sharing!
I hear you brother!
Love this. I agree that at the end of the day as a writer, it is you and you alone that choose to shoulder that backpack or not, pick your own path over, under or around the mountains, but I do think there is value in hearing how others did it too. Even if they had different mountains to climb, some skills, the way to hack with a machete, are common. But no one, and no amount of just talking about it, can take you all the way to where you want to go.