Sometimes I wonder if there’s really a limit to creative energy, or if I just tend to think so.
I got in my 1K again today (yay! horns, confetti, ect!), but now I don’t feel like writing my blog. Alas.
Sometimes I think it’s just discipline. Halle made an interesting comment on the Ritual & Madness post that she’s come to believe that ritual is all about discipline, and that the emotional response to disruption is simply knowing how hard it is to regain the discipline. I think she’s got a great point there. I’ve read about authors who write in hugely disciplined ways. The beyond-prolific Nora Roberts says she writes eight hours a day. (Some out there will claim this is because she’s doing factory-genre writing, rather than true Art, but that’s neither here nor there.) And many novelists started out as journalists; they often cite that kind of disciplined, churn-out-articles-every-day writing as what built their ability to write consistently.
For myself, I find I don’t seem to write — to compose — for more than a couple of hours at a time. I have a whole day to write, and I find myself composing for two hours or so, and revising the rest. That and doing business, like queries, submissions, etc.
What with my dream of being a full-time writer, I wonder if that means I’ll still write about two hours a day and dork around for the rest…
That’s what dreams are all about!
Two hours? Luxury. Drones like me, toiling away in anonymity in Sector 7G of a giant, multi-national mega-corporation, with all the meetings and emails and status reports and blog-reading, why, we’re lucky to get in two hours of actual, focused, creative work per week.