It’s something I didn’t expect to happen. 🥹
The past month was the lowest in productivity as a writer since I started to write fiction daily back in 2020. I didn’t know how to begin writing or what to write. And I wondered if I started writing after the small hiatus I had two months ago, it wouldn’t be worth it, or somehow my readers on the fiction apps would hate it.
They will see through my words and chapters and scenes, and everything will fall apart.
This new fear was perhaps both my heightened anxiety after the hiatus combined with lots of coffee and my general imposter syndrome speaking to me. Whatever I got down on my Google Docs wasn’t good enough, so I held myself back from publishing anything for a month.
My procrastination habit was also partially to blame.
I would wake up at 7:30 every day like clockwork, clean the house, take a shower, get ready to go to the gym, lift heavy weights, walk back home, cook lunch, and by 2 p.m. on any average weekday. And as a result, I would be exhausted.
Then I would sit my ass in front of the computer and try to start writing for the day. And when I would write, I would try to be perfect. I would try to sound fancy. I would try to make my sentences sound lyric-y and magical as if the reader came to read not the story I was writing on the daily but lyrical prose that fills them with magical realism or something.
Needless to say, it burnt me out sooner than writing in my usual nonsensical style did, and it made me fear the computer like anything.
It’s true what someone on the internet has said about writers avoiding sitting down to write.
“Writers will do anything but write.”
And my circumstances then weren’t far from it. I would go on Facebook and feel a sense of inferiority and a tad bit of envy when I would see writers cranking out 10,000 words a day like it was nobody’s business while I was suffering in silence, finding it hard to get down 1,000 words per day to keep my stories updated according to the schedule.
My own sense of inferiority and inability to produce my words started to get in my way.
It started hampering my productivity like anything I have seen before. To be frank, I would have low energy levels to begin with after all the chores I got done in the morning, and on top of that, adding a magnanimous task to be perfect while writing would kill the flow of words.
Well, they say if it doesn’t get better, it won’t get worse. But they are wrong.
For me, it was the worst circumstance in my life.
I haven’t had a good flow state work day in months, but in the past month, my writing output hit a new low.
I knew I had to do something to make my way out of this writing rut.
This past Saturday, when I was having a panic attack because I failed to pay a bill on time because money had been slow since my writing output had been low, I made a decision.
My decision would change things for the better, at least for the time being.
I made a decision to just write and kick the idea of perfection to the curb.
When I put off that unnecessary load that I had been carrying on my shoulders for the past year, my words came out. They swarmed me with new ideas like I had opened the floodgates that had been holding them back.
So this past week, all I did was write, and I didn’t care about the outcomes. I also tracked my words on a Google sheet, and lo and behold, I just inputted my 12,898 words late last night when I went to bed at 2 a.m. after having a very productive late-night sprint where I wrote down 3,415 words.
And it’s not the end of the week yet.
I still want to know what Sunday looks like and see where this takes me.
It’s for sure helping me finish the books I have ongoing. And I do want to complete my ongoing serials before the year is before.
We’ll see where this new approach to writing takes me.
If you’d like to read my online serial, read it here: https://novelcath5.novelfox.net/v1/app_share/authorShare/book/122401/0?author_user_id=4040670
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