There are many Ps to writing...publishing, paper, pen, process. One of the worst Ps to writing though would have to be procrastination. When you have a full time job and you are a single mother, it is often easy to lay the trap of procrastination. It becomes easy to say, "I can't write today I am so busy at work." or "Maybe I will do that tomorrow but today my son has this event or that event." I have found myself the past few months in the land of the Ps.
I was extremely busy at work and with my son finishing up his sixth grade year that it was easy to cling to those reasons and not do as much writing. Writing does take work and a lot of it. It is work I love but it is work and with anything worthwhile it takes time. Often it is hard to find the time when you feel as if you are the rope in a tug of war contest between working your job, being a mother, writing and having time to yourself. It is important then to make the time to write. It is important to organize even thirty minutes a day to doing what you feel is creative and that keeps your mind active in your story. Otherwise, it is easy to lose the story altogether and the steam you had created as it continued to progress. Even trains start out slowly until they gather speed. Writing is the same way. You can not sit down and instantly have a completed novel or play sitting in front of you. It takes you stoking the fires so that it can progress faster and faster down that route.
That is not to say that all procrastination is bad. It can be given a useful purpose where you can plan and plot out the next steps in your manuscript. You can think about your characters motivations more or even get a little research done as you sit and enjoy the leisure of vacant time. However, as nice and magical and colorful as Wonderland was, even Alice had to return to her own time. So, as my big annual meeting has ended months ago and my son is now done with school, done also are my excuses and back to the writing I go.
It can be easy or hard to get back to doing something you enjoy. It may be that you start by writing in a journal again, or you write a piece for work that will go in a newsletter or you simply write a descriptive email to a friend or, as I am doing here, you put a long awaited post on a blog. Once you start writing it reawakens the writer within and you feel the steam start to power your train of creativity and it starts to chug along faster and faster until once again those ideas are pouring out of you. Once again the characters are real and the story needs to be told. You set up your outlines and your goals and you begin writing again...then as you lay your pen down or take your hands from the keyboard after a day of feverishly typing out your new ideas you sigh with relief and say, "Welcome back my old friend." With that you have left the land of the Ps and you are back to writing again.
