Can I do a total honesty thing? You know what my #1 obstacle to writing is? Working. This week, my bosses decided to “punish” me by cutting my hours, and you know what happened? I wrote a ton. Every hour I should have been working I spent writing instead, and it was awesome and fabulous and fantastic. I probably wrote over 10,000 words in a week.
(That’s a big number for me, by the way. I know some people can write that in a day, but I don’t. Some months I only write 25,000 words or less)
And the thing is, I didn’t try to write more. I didn’t drag myself to the library, put myself on the clock, and say “I’m going to sit here until I’ve clocked X number of hours writing.” I didn’t try to fill the hours I would have been working with words.
I did it anyway.
This is so motivating and yet so, so disappointing. Because it’s just one week, right, so it’s a skewed sample size, but it also points out something I was so, so reluctant to acknowledge. Working full time has harmed my writing. It has sucked the life and the energy out of me so that when I come home at night, all I want to do is crawl into bed. Sometimes I force myself to write anyway, but my pace is different, and my sessions are short. I don’t start two hour sessions that result in 2000 word scenes. I write for half an hour and give up after 300 words.
So obviously I’ve got to figure out how to make a change. I know my current job is killing me. Maybe the best I can hope for is that by getting a new one, the strangulation, the complete cutting off of all my creative air, won’t be so bad?
(I just hope they don’t want me to work more than forty hours. Because I can’t. I just really can’t.)