I said that I wasn’t going to upload a chapter without having the next one completed, but I caved. I posted chapter six to Wattpad without having chapter seven done. I know, I broke my own rule. Unfortunately, it had been two weeks since I uploaded anything for Frigid Nights and I needed to give you guys some material. I’m working on finishing chapter seven now, it’s probably going to be shorter because I’m not sure where it’s going or how the hell I’m going to get it moving forward from where it currently is. But, I will power through and get there somehow.
I wrote a little last night, I couldn’t fall asleep and I felt a little inspiration so I wrote a tiny tiny bit. I was watching Midnight in Paris. It’s a movie about a writer who thinks he should’ve lived in 1920s Paris and one night while out walking and having gotten drunk, he is enticed into a 1920s model taxi and essentially time warps back to 20s Paris and meets Hemingway, Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers and artists and it just got stuff going. While the storyline itself was decent, I focused on the interactions with past writers that I’d never been able to speak to. I liked the way the movie talked about the inspiration writers get and how it comes and goes. But I didn’t like that it made you think you have to be inspired in order to write.
This video on YouTube called “How an artist turns pro” had some interesting insights on the subject. For example, Steven Pressfield says “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this; It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.” A lot of people think you need to be inspired to write good work. While inspiration definitely does help, you get inspiration while writing. Once you start, it’ll start to flow and you’ll find a groove you get into. Writer’s block only comes, in my opinion, from not physically writing. If you sit down, start typing something, anything, it’ll come.
Most writers will tell you, writing isn’t hard. Sitting down to write is hard. We spend more time thinking about writing than actually writing. It keeps us from accomplishing the writing we know we need to do. Eventually, we will get to it but we’re going to procrastinate the shit out of it before we do.
Drew Schroeder 