Stop Avoiding the Inevitable
Sitting down to write can be one of the hardest things to do. Some days, I would rather do laundry rather than write and I hate doing laundry.
But I know that I’m not alone in this regard. There are plenty of writers who drag their feet when it comes to writing. This may be because we don’t know what to write about. Or it could be because we expect that whatever flows onto the page will be in perfect form. Sometimes this may cause us to never get pass the first paragraph. Call it procrastination. Call it writer’s block. I call it avoiding the inevitable.
A writer must write. If you never actually sit down and write something, you are not a writer. It’s really as simple as that.
One cure I use to combat “avoiding the inevitable” is reflective writing. Reflective writing allows you to arrive at the page of your journal, with or without a topic, with nowhere to go. This may seem quite pointless, but trust me, it’s not.
Say if you would like to write a personal essay and you already have a compelling topic, but don’t know exactly what to say or where to begin, writing reflectively will help you sort out your thoughts, examine the relevancy of the details, explore motives of the people involved, find the moral of the story, etc.
Say if you would like to write a personal essay, but haven’t a clue what to write about, reflective writing can also yield a remedy. Just start writing. This is also known as automatic writing. Even though you don’t know what to say, just keep writing, and soon enough you will arrive at a topic. Normally, I arrive at a topic within the first ten minutes of automatic writing. Once you have stumbled upon a topic, began reflective writing on that topic.
So stop surfing the web – a very common device in avoiding the inevitable – and start writing.
