It really is sometimes.
This is not the post I had planned for this week.
I’m part way through writing the longest post I’ve ever written for this blog (which is not that hard when you only have four posts—yikes), and I’m finding that it’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Which is, naturally, a little bit discouraging.
Since I gave the blog a facelift in February, it has been my goal to publish one blog post per week at minimum. But here I am, only four posts in, and I’m already struggling to make good on this commitment.
But I’m going to fix it.
Let this post be a reminder that it’s okay to step back for a bit and regroup. See the forest for the trees. Get your head out of the dirt.
It’s easy to get caught up in all of the little details sometimes. For instance, this post I’m working on has a lot of quotations from a book, and I’m having a really hard time narrowing all of them down to the best ones. But at the end of the day, the quotations are only part of the post, and the interpretation of the quotes is arguably much more important anyway.
But in order to make this current post useful, here’s a short list of things that I find helpful when I’m trying to write something and I get stuck:
1. Take a break that has nothing to do with writing and ideally gets you away from the desk:
- Go for a walk
- Take a shower
- Work out
- Make a cup of tea
- Listen to music
- Eat something
- Call a friend
- Clean your living space
- Meditate
- Procreate
2. Write something else for a while:
- A whiny blog post
- A poem
- A short story
- An article
- A nice long message to a friend you haven’t contacted in ages and may even have forgotten you exist, but will hopefully be delighted to hear from you nonetheless
Feel free to leave more suggestions in the comments.
Whatever you decide to do, spend a good amount of time doing it, at least an hour or so.
Now you can faceplant into the dirt again and see if it feels different. If it feels good, great. Stay there as long as you can.
If not, go back and try something different until it works.
I’ll see you next week with the longer blog post. I do hope it makes up for this one!
As always, feel free to discuss in the comments below or reach out via the contact form. I’d love to hear from you!
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