Finding the Flow
What’s your best rhythm/routine for work, creativity?
Maybe a better question is, have you returned to yours? We have all read, written and discussed how the pandemic has changed our goals, priorities, energy levels; really every thing about life that we had figured out. The new normal is maybe not so normal, yet.
Pre-pandemic, years of hard work was put in to rid myself of a habit of stopping what I was doing to write when inspiration came. It worked, I got into a different groove, but it wasn’t as productive, and it certainly didn’t flow well at all. There was lots of moaning about how awkward it was, and my family got really tired of hearing me whine.
When they thought they were getting relief because I got tired too, and decided alll was going to revert, go back to the flow/habits/routine that made so much possible (insert a sad chuckle here). That didn’t work out like I thought it would. take. That still new and much despised “organized” and “productive” self-expectation still had a firm hold.
Picking up really old habits that worked for me was hard to weed through the more recent unproductive ones. The mentality and expectation in recent years that I had cultivated has still been getting in my way. Every once in a while, there is a bit of time here and maybe a day there that seems to work out right — creative inspiration rides the tide supreme.
Because this is the month of publication for my first story, that' children’s chapter book, it is marked down on Amazon (ebook format) for July. To remind me that I have done this and I can again. As of this writing, there is a first draft content edit awaiting some focus time. There are also many bare bone stories in notebooks that have yet to have their time to be fleshed out and drafted, so it isn’t that there is nothing to work on.
It is about letting myself work..Writing for me isn’t a nine to five kind of job. It is a creative pursuit that I once thought I knew about doing, My expectations and that of others overrode my good common sense. Eh, and a lot of damaged self esteem, that didn’t help either. Years trying to rebuild my confidence, figure my process of writing out, how to get better at storytthings. Figure out what I needed to learn. The writer part of me took lots of notes, recorded observations, now, I look back at those notes as research.
But here I am still trying to find that sweet spot again of trusting the process, my process of writing, the drafts, the edits, the rewriting, the how. Don’t know when the next book will be up for sale, but I am working on it.