Now that I’m an adult, I have to bow a bit to my parents’ ideas of priorities. No one else is going to make me get to work on time or buy groceries so I don’t starve. When I graduated from college, all these adult responsibilities descended on me like some flying nightmare. And I’ve been struggling to identify my true priorities ever since.

I suppose it has something to do with self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which has always made sense to me, though I’m aware that it has been criticized). As little as I like to admit it, the basic necessities (food, shelter, sleep) do have to come first. And next, according to Maslow, is security, like employment. And then love and self-esteem. And only when someone has achieved all these things is there room in life for creativity. Practically, I recognize that this is true. If I spent all my time worrying about being unemployed or unable to keep my little family going, I’d have no energy for creativity. But if I were making my own hierarchy, I think I’d put creativity right after food. Because if I don’t have the opportunity to create, I’m still hungry no matter how full my belly is.

All this is very poetic, but like everything else, it comes down to day to day, moment to moment decisions. What should I do with myself today? What am I going to do in this very next moment? Can I write for another fifteen minutes and risk being late to work? Can I read for another hour or two at bedtime and be completely exhausted tomorrow? What are my real priorities? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet.

I want to keep loving writing. That’s more important to me than being published. I want to keep writing no matter what, because my brain gets itchy when I’m not writing. If I go too long without writing, I’m miserable. But I needed a couple of weeks to let the brain fog clear and to relax into writing again without the pressure of a word count goal hanging over my head. So for the past two weeks, even though I didn’t make myself write, I found my mind drifting again and again to my stories and what I’d do with them when I picked them up again. Because there was never a question that I would go back to writing.

Both John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier blogged recently about what it means to be a writer. John was asked if he would ever quit writing and he basically said no, because it’s a part of who he is. Justine talked about the difference between writer as identity and writer as a career. Careers come and go, but writers write, and that’s really all there is to it. What I need to do is stop trying to write by rules that work for other people but not for me.

So I’m giving up on the daily goal of 500 or 1000 words. It’s the kind of thing that works well for a lot of people, but I don’t seem to be one of them. This doesn’t mean I won’t be writing, even writing every day. It just means that I’m not going to stress myself out about an arbitrary goal when all I should be thinking about are the stories themselves.

Also, I’ve committed to daily writing as part of Inkygirl’s 1000 Words a Day Challenge. I’ve already skipped two days, but I cheated and made up the word count a couple of days later, so don’t tell anyone, ok?

Most days, committing to a specific word count without a particular project goal helps me sit down and just start writing. It works even better if I do it first thing in the morning before my brain has woken up and started telling me I suck. It takes me about half an hour to an hour to blast out 1000 words of freewriting, which usually consists of mulling over elements of various stories. By then I’ve woken up a bit, so I move onto one of my projects.

It’s easier for me to work on a story when I’ve spent a while limbering up my brain. More importantly, freewriting gets me into the rhythm of writing. I might start with meaningless rambling, but one thing leads to another, and connections between things spark ideas I never would have had if I’d made myself get up and stare at a project file until I gave up and went back to bed. Writing is a muscle that gets stiff and easily tired when it’s not used. This daily challenge is my workout.

Thanks again to Inkygirl for the idea and the spiffy graphic! Complete information, including badges for 500 and 250 word challenges, are available on Deb Ohi (inkygirl)’s website.

Sorry about that.

I whine that I’m not revising the project I should be, that all my shorts turn into sagas, and on and on. But the problem is that I’m overthinking instead of writing. I know that the writing isn’t just going to flow all the time and of course I need to think about what does and doesn’t work in my stories so I can fix them instead of just shoving them in a drawer or worse, out into the world as they are.

What I don’t need to do is get wrapped up in meta-writing to the exclusion of real writing. Can I call myself a writer? What does that mean anyway? What if I never get the motivation and this thing whithers and dies and I’ve wasted all this time? What if my writing has some fatal flaw that I can never overcome?

It’s ok, you can say it. I get sick of listening to me too.

Most of my worries are pretty pointless when I write them out, which is the benefit of doing it, as long as I don’t let it go too far.  This weekend I did something novel, for me at least. I ignored my angst about whether or not I can write and just wrote. I revised a short-short story I’ve had sitting around for a couple of weeks and ended up pretty pleased with it. And then I spun those characters around, made them do the hokey-pokey, and ended up with some serious progress on another short story.

It’s true, whining gets you nowhere unless you’re one of my cats.

That's his food bin he's standing on, in case we missed the point of all that noise he's making.

Why, hello.  *waves at self in the mirror*

Good to know I’m not the only one.  Of course, I may have no need to fear success, since I keep sabotaging myself so that I’ll never have to try it out.  I especially resonated with worrying that anything I accomplish will self-destruct, feeling self-conscious when someone compliments me, and feeling let down or empty rather than celebratory when I’ve finished something.  A lot of the time I’m avoiding working on something not because it’s hard but because I’ll have to show it to someone when it’s done.  Whether that’s fear of success or failure, I don’t know.  Could be both.

Anyone else?  What do you fear more, success or failure?