last writing meet for 2009

Tonight we had our last writing meet up for the year. With one of our members away on holidays, it was left to me and Daniel to shoot the shit and generally avoid the prospect of writing by talking about it.

Amongst many topics (the state of Australian politics, China’s human rights record and the future of humanity in general) we talked about our respective failures of late to get below the surface of our writing. That we had lost the love of the sentence; that feeling you get when you nail the ‘sound’ of a sentence or passage of writing.

Part of it, I decided, was my inability to devote more than half an hour at a time to writing. Half an hour a night might be a good ongoing practice procedure, but it doesn’t give you any space to get comfortable with a sentence or paragraph. Just one good sentences can take me an hour to get right. My 30 minutes gets me to the surface, and by the time I pick it up again the next day, I have to jump start the whole creative process again.

The culprit: my desktop internet browser icon.

I earn a living as a digital marketer, which means I have picked up some really bad gen Y habits. Primarily, I’ve developed two unhealthy habits for a writer: a short attention span and an expectation for instant returns. I am so used to hitting the net to relieve boredom that the idea of simply using my computer to ‘type on the keyboard’ seems so archaic.

My strength as a digital marketer – the ability to be constantly switched on, reacting and experiencing moment to moment – is turning out to be my biggest writing vice. I can’t seem to take time to just write anymore. I’m back to chopping wood with a blunt axe everytime I attempt a sentence and because I rarely stick at it more than half an hour, I never overcome this initial creative hump. I have too many outs.

Hence, one of my new years resolutions for 2010 is to try and find ways to reduce distractions around my ‘writing place’. Next year I’m taking my writing out of the house and going mobile.

This year I had great success writing at a local cafe on my lunch break; something about unburdening myself from the expectations of a home study really seemed to work. In 2010, I’ll be looking for similar places to write and will be gauging the effectiveness.

If you have had any success in writing out of the home, let me know about it by leaving a comment below.

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