What rises to the surface. #Reverb10 – Day 2

Today I wrote the title after the piece,  I think that works better.

Today’s Reverb10 prompt is from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and mnmlst : What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

This question makes sense coming from him because he is all about cutting down to the juice, to the essentials, to keeping the important parts and shedding the rest.

I’ve been thinking about this prompt for hours now, while I did some work, tidied up, helped my kids make Christmas cards,  got ready for Taekwon-do and tooled around on the internet.  What is it that gets in the way of my writing?

I don’t have a lot of the usual writer’s procrastination things.  Blank pages hardly ever frighten me.  I don’t worry about it being perfect. I’m not hung up on publishing – although it would be nice.  I rarely worry about what other people are going to think of what I’ve written.

But, and this is a big one.  I let EVERYTHING and ANYTHING get in the way of my writing.  For example, at least two of the five things I listed above didn’t need to be done, but instead of sitting down and writing this entry, I tidied up and jumped from site to site on the ole internets.  I enjoyed Taekwon-do and making Christmas cards, and the work was necessary but I tidied and internetted it up to tune out and still feel productive (I was reading business-related blogs).

This clearly ties into my boundary thing from yesterday.

I can’t or I won’t draw a clear boundary around my writing time.  I can make anything seem more important than getting words on paper (or on screen in this case),  and that irritates the hell out of me.

How can I eliminate that?

I think some planning will help. Picking a specific time of day to write.  Picking certain things to write at given times.

But really, the thing I will have to eliminate is my internal reasoning that somehow these creative things I do for myself aren’t all that important.

I had no idea that was in there until I just typed it.

Well now, Christine, where do you go from here?