I DON'T FEEL LIKE WRITING

Well who cares how you feel? Write anyway.

This was an enormous lesson that took me years to truly grasp and reap the benefits. If we all went through life always doing what we “felt” like doing complete anarchy would erupt. This concept has inspired a franchise thriller movie flick “The Purge”, in which for one night no laws apply and everyone is able to purge their system of all hatred without consequences, even murder. This makes for a very interesting plot line for a movie, but here in the real world mass chaos has no appeal to me.

Circling back to writing, I write on a consistent basis regardless of whether I “feel “ like writing or not. I think many artists live with the notion that artistic inspiration will come first, always, and then after we are inspired the art will be produced. In my experience this is rarely the case. I write to feed inspiration in order to write more.

I can relate it to the idea of gratitude. Being part of the Oprah, self-help, Deepak Chopra generation I am sure we have heard ad nauseam the idea of becoming aware of the things we are grateful for and how it can have a huge positive impact on one’s greedy, selfish, super-size-me, American life. Gratitude is self-perpetuating, the more you talk about it, write about it or think about it, the more innate gratitude you end up feeling.

Using this comparison to writing, for my process, the more I scribble my rainbow unicorn pen across the page, the more ideas, images, gut-wrenching sadness, and imaginative bubbles my writers brain creates. Like gratitude it is self-perpetuating. I once wrote about not wanting to write, how terrible of a writer I was and that I will always be, forever. This actually turned into a very funny satirical piece on writers and artists in general.

One never knows where their inspiration will come for their “Catcher In The Rye “ or “ Oops I Did it Again “. And yes I just made reference to J.D. Salinger and Britney Spears in the same sentence....to keep you interested, or I form a resentment from your boredom and you could be added to my “purge” list. Just keep writing.