Writer's Regrets

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!" 




                                         Maud Muller 

                                                 John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)







Ever have one of those days when everything just seems to push you into sitting down and getting in a solid few hours' writing time?   It's a holiday week-end, the more conscientious family members are putting in time at the gym, and it's hot enough outside to render yard work indisputably impossible.  So you drop onto your chair, fire up the PC - and fall into a game of computer solitaire because the words just won't come.  That's been my morning so far.




If online forums are any indication, I'm not alone.  From the posts I read, it seems that 

for very writer, everywhere, finding time to actually write is life's most frustrating challenge.  Weekdays, for most of us, there's the day job.  Nights, weekends, holidays: for some unfathomable reason our spouses, kids, families, and friends expect that we should get our butts off the chair long enough to acknowledge their contributions to our comfort - or to at least take out the garbage. Then, when we finally DO manage to set aside an hour or two to get those words onto the page our very surroundings seem to burst into spontaneous distractions.  I know from long experience than my kitchen floor never cries out to be scrubbed until I sit down at the keyboard.  Worse, by the time  I do finally banish the last distraction, all the snappy dialog and sharp scenes that've been bubbling behind my mind's eye simply evaporate.  I'm left staring at a blank screen with a blank mind.




And yet... the only way to ever get those stories out is to get them down on the page. That's what keeps my spreading gluteus maximus glued to the chair:  the certain knowledge that I've put off getting those words down on the page before.  Way too often, before.  What forces me to dredge up the dialog and scene setting is the memory of all the stories I let get away.  All the ones I will never call back.  So I soldier on, determined not to live down to Whittier's bitter observation.




How about you?  Do you ever suffer the same problem?   Sign up in the long subscription box and let me know!