All The Reasons I Can’t Write
I don’t know about all of my creative friends, but there are days I struggle with writing, creating, getting into the right mindset for writing and feeling my writing is more than just a pile of pig poop drawing flies in the hot summer sun.
Fortunately, at this moment, I’m not in that mindset. But I am sorta struggling with a direction to take in terms of my writing. I’ve got three large irons in the fire and at the moment, I’m grappling with the quality of my memoir and essay writing. Now, granted, this might have something to do with the contest rejection I received over the weekend, but rejections don’t normally send me spinning–I take rejection as a sign that my piece wasn’t meant to be wherever I sent it, and I send it out again.
But my memoir work seems to be what I’m questioning most now–for whatever reason. I thought that since I’m in a good, positive frame of mind right now, I’d investigate the reasons why I think I can’t write memoir. Now, kids, be sure you try this at home, but NOT (absolutely NOT) when you are in a negative frame of mind. It’s not the right perspective, and you will do serious damage to your creative soul if you explore your writing psyche while you’re already kicked to the curb. Save it for a time when things are going well, when you feel positive. It adds a certain amount of levity as well as perspective to the exercise–and really, you can get a better grip on why your excuses are really, quite lame 
All The Reasons I Can’t (Or Shouldn’t) Write Memoir:
- I don’ t know how.
- Not enough memories or life experiences.
- Nothing interesting ever happens to me.
- My truth may hurt others.
- I can’t write for more than an hour at a time.
- I can’t finish essays/memoir pieces.
- I don’t know any publishers, agents or editors.
- I can’t always find the truth in the piece.
- I can’t always find the universality in the piece.
- It’s hard to tell the truth.
- All of my friends write romance; I don’t have any memoir friends.
- I’m never sure which piece to work on.
- I’m not published in full-length fiction.
- I can’t sustain a book of memoir.
- I don’t have enough memories for a full-length book.
- Teaching crunches my time for 180 days a year.
- I am so afraid of incompletion I may never start writing.
- I won the first memoir contest I entered so I’m a one-hit wonder.
Fascinating. I actually wrote this list back at the start of the school year–August–but the idea really resonated with me today as I whined about not knowing what to work on. As I typed some of these, the immediate untruth about them (“I can’t write more than an hour at a time”) struck me. I’m truthfully tempted to write a series of blog posts on each one of these to debunk their assumed power over my creative thought process.
I may do that. In the meantime, I think I will also write a list of all the reasons I can write. Let’s see where that takes me. What about you? What excuses are you giving yourself that limit your creativity?
It's pretty simple, really. I'm a writer who loves writing about writing, and sharing all the tricks of the trade with other writers. And when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. I have a hunch you know what I mean :)