I give myself such very good advice

For those of you about to say some variation of “I told you so,” I admit it, you were right.  When other people complain that they can’t get started writing their Great American Novels, I recommend that they try writing a little something every day – a short scene, a description, maybe a snippet of conversation.  From there, I tell them, you can get used to writing, and you’ll write.

Did you know that it’s possible to take your own advice?  When I get stuck, I normally try to write something else – one of the ghost-writing projects, or something else – but it feels like a Big Writing Project and then it becomes an intimidating venture.  A paragraph describing the shadows under the leaves of the potted plant on my mantel, however, is most emphatically not a Project, nor a venture of any kind.  It’s a paragraph.  Anyone can write a paragraph.  OK, except the illiterate, but let’s not get hung up on semantics here.

And apparently, when you write a paragraph, you get used to writing.  And then… then you write the entire intro to a piece for someone else, and make some major headway on your novel (which I don’t need to capitalize because it’s not a Great American Novel, mostly because I’m not originally American).

So anyway, to those of you who repeated my advice back to me, I really do appreciate it.  Until I become independently wealthy thereby joining the ranks of the idle rich, I still have to fit the writing in around other things in my life – like my job for instance (I keep waiting for the Lottery Fairy, but I think that my plan is lacking, seeing as I don’t buy tickets).  However, these moments of revitalization really do help.  Watching the pages of a notepad fill up or seeing the page count on your Word doc climb higher and higher can really make your day.  Well, they make my day – I don’t know about you.