Remember the fun

A while back I found myself stuck in writing a script. I restarted over and over again, but ended up being stuck at the same place every single time. I got more and more frustrated. My go-to-solution for most problems is always to go out and take a walk, and during this walk I kept trying to solve the problem to why I wasn’t able to write. Then it hit me.

I was trying my very best to get the story written. No hard feelings about that, but it turned out to be the devastating factor. I was focusing on being productive and to deliver a material to the team, and so I was forcing the story out cause I “had” to, and was no longer writing the story for fun or for the pleasure of telling a story. What happens when one writes through that lens is the the writer tend to lean towards learned patterns of storytelling. It’s easier to go for stereotypes, and we tend to write in a technical way compared to a passionate one. I was doing the job, but without the love.

Numerous times I have said what a ton of people before me have said, a writer can’t always write on inspiration, cause we can’t afford to sit and wait for it. But is that really the truth?

What I found out being stuck for a few days was that the only thing I had to do to get out of my “perform and produce results mode” was to change my perspective on what I was doing and reshape the state I had put myself in. And it only took 3 minutes!

I got up on my feet, did some physical exercises and reshaped my attitude. I made myself remember why I want to tell the story so the purpose and the result was clear to me. And then I sat down and told myself, “Let’s write because it’s the best thing I know, and let’s write for fun, and with passion – and if it turns out to be crappy writing, I can rewrite the whole thing tomorrow!”

Sitting down by the the computer with that energy transformed both the experience of writing and injected the story with the love and fun it needed. And I got the work done in a heartbeat.

When thinking about this month’s theme “inspiration” I am not sure the word (when it comes to writing) comes from outside ourselves at all, but from within. We are the ones doing the work. No matter if we think we get a seed to a story from something exterior, it’s our brain, heart and soul that in an instant fertilize the seed and turn it into a plant. We are the instigators, and we can access that force whenever we need. We just need to learn how to put ourselves in an “inspired” state so we can perform on a high enough level every single day.

 

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