I've read a lot of writing advice in my day. Sometimes I just scour the Internet, pretending I'm actually doing work, when in reality, I'm just reading what other people have to say about writing. And despite being widely heralded as the greatest authors of all time, most of their advice can be boiled down to the Nike logo: "Just do it." While that's plenty inspiring, it does not change the blank Word document staring at me while I set up my work space at Starbucks. Here I set out my pens, here I flip my notebook to a blank page. Plug my headphones into my ears and scroll through my thousands of songs to find the right album to fit what I'm writing today. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Check this blog. Play a Facebook game or two. Take a sip of my overpriced but delicious coffee. Watch kids outside play in the rain.
And lo, I have still not Just Do(ne) It.
A lot of this writing advice centers around beginnings. They say beginnings are the hardest part. I can only partially agree with this, because the lazy, work-avoiding part of me wants to do everything but write. I can sit around in my own brain for hours and hours, thinking up stories, but when it comes down to beginning, I'm just lazy. It's not that it's hard. It's that I'm being a baby.
If you are reading this, I'm pretty sure you're just being a baby. You should be writing right now, banging out that NaNoWriMo 2011 word count. Beginning isn't the hardest part. Beginning is the easiest, but we want our masterpieces to just come to us, fully formed, without any work from ourselves. Beginning may be scary and everything you start out doing may turn out to be utter crap, but, to quote another athletic adage, "No matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everybody on the couch."
I hope my procrastination was sufficiently inspiring. I'm off to actually work now.
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