Ecstasy! My Procrastination is Broken!

I am ecstatic! Why? Because I was just given the entire day to do nothing but write, and Song of the Daystar now sits at almost 78k! And I hope to get it to 80k or more before the night is over. If that’s not something to leap for joy about, I don’t know what is! (well, perhaps I will also leap for joy when the book is finally finished… and when/if I get an agent… and when a publishing company finally says “yes, we want to see this on the shelves!”. I will probably leap for joy then too.)

The awful truth is that these last few weeks I have had almost no time to work on it at all. Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve told myself, “you will work on it tonight,” and I’ve actually sat down to the computer and put my fingers on the keyboard… but that’s about as far as it went. I would remember a homework assignment due the next day, or decide that I should finish reading that one last chapter of that one particular book… and that was the end of my writing session.

Now, tomorrow I’m heading back to school and my joyous weekend of writing will be over. But hopefully I won’t pick up where I left off with procrastination. The Dreaded Writer’s Block is flown and I can feel all these potential ideas milling about in my mind. Hopefully this will be a good week for writing too!

With all that said, I know I’m not the only one who suffers from this horrible writer’s disease known as both “Procrastination” and “Writer’s Block”. Every person I know who’s ever felt called to put pen to paper and write a story has felt the symptoms creep up on them at least once. The only remedy I’ve found that actually works for me is to just sit down and write; it doesn’t matter if I’m trying to plan my next step (which doesn’t happen often) or if I’m writing a new scene, or editing some old scenes. If I just sit down and write something – anything! – the damn holding back my imagination will break, the room will fill with crackling energy, and my fingers will fly across the keyboard so fast that my mom will swear she sees smoke coming from them.

And that’s what happened today.

However, I’ve heard some people claim they use a different method, and I’m certainly not going to say that it’s wrong. Some people go back to their original inspiration and try to remember what made them want to write in the first place.  Some people listen to a certain type of music, or look at a picture.  Whatever gets a person writing is as good a remedy as any. So what method do you use to “break” writer’s block? Let me know. If it works for you, it’s worth giving it a shot and I may try it sometime as well! :)