What to do when it's soooo hard to get to the page.

How to earn the good days.

I’ve turned many elements of my life that I love into work. The most profound happened many years ago when I was just tipping from teenager to adult, figuring out the ways of the working world. I decided I wanted to be a writer. That secret thing that I most loved was what I wanted to make my real job. (Here’s a picture of me pretending to work ;-)))))

Don’t get me wrong. I started working when I was fourteen in a restaurant, earning ten pounds plus tips for shifts that started at 5:30pm and went on sometimes into the small hours. Those ten pounds mattered to me and I bust it to earn the extra tips, smiling harder, pleasing customers, accepting the jerks and the jokes, wearing a shorter skirt as suggested by my boss.

But that’s a different story. That’s a story about how I equate work with money, perhaps, and something for me to unpack another day. I’ve done lots of jobs that paid me along the way to being able to live as a writer, and I still do other work now: mainly teaching for The Novelry which I love so much. But today, I want to talk to you about two things:

1. How hard it is to get to the page sometimes.

2. How to earn the good days.

On the harder days, the days when I’m tired and the children have pulled me in every direction but toward my book, and I have a deadline, but my creative spirit is low, I repeat to myself:

I believe that to earn the good days, I have to work on most of the days.

To pull the joy and magic from the writing process, I have to redo the act over and over, expecting nothing from writing but the possibility that some days—the good days, I call them—I’ll get into that creative space where it feels amazing.

And on the other days, it won’t. Those days, it feels unlikely. Impossible.

I remind myself that as a reader, later, when I look over my writing, or when you do, it isn’t possible to tell the difference between the challenge days and the good days. The easy writing days are impossible to distinguish from the ones where writing even one word seemed as ludicrous as a llama appearing on a long straight highway in the prairies from nowhere. (That actually happened. Another story…)

Day in and out, showing up to the page looks like (eventually) a messy first draft, and then a second. One day, it becomes something that I call a book and I ask someone else to read.

Do you find it hard to show up sometimes? Because while I have the mindset and the practice and the reminders (etc etc etc), I also have the times when it’s too much of a struggle. So, I just walk away. I lay down and close my eyes and shut out the world and say: Not today. (Not for long, mind—my children have a habit of requiring me to get up!)

But I do choose that space sometimes; I need that and I know that tomorrow, or the day after, I’ll be on the page, working, finding the next word (and llamas…), earning the good days.

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xoxoxo

Alice