Although, ironically, this is probably my longest blog entry so far…

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with writing. I want to write, I”d go so far as to say I have the urge to write, but when I sit down to do it, I talk myself out of it before I’ve put anything down on paper.

It wasn’t always difficult. I started writing when I was about seven years old – that’s when I knew I wanted to be a writer. It’s also when I made my first ”serious” attempt at writing a story. I remember it was about a group of wild cats, from the cats’ point of view. I had a huge love for the book Watership Down by Richard Adams and I clearly remember wishing I could write something as cool. I never finished it – it wasn’t a short story, it was going to be a novel. There were pages and pages of it. More than a seven year old has any business writing! I’m sure it was mostly crap, but that’s not the point. I enjoyed writing it.
I wrote on and off throughout my teenage years, again, nothing great (in my opinion) but it was still enjoyable.

I’m not really clear on what happened. I think I got too serious. By the time I was in my twenties, I realised that if I wanted to write seriously, I was going to have to start writing well. Or rather, I couldn’t go around telling people that I was a writer or that I enjoyed writing without people asking to read what I’d written. I also no longer had the luxury of blaming my (what I considered) bad writing on youth or immaturity. Successful writers seemed to be getting younger and younger and I was getting more and more disheartened.

As a result, I haven’t really written anything of worth in the last ten years or so. I try, but I get frustrated. I’ve spent some time on short stories, but I’m never happy with them, and there’s no way I would show them to anyone else! I always end up wondering why I’ve bothered.

I seem to have no problem with ideas, but when I go to put them down on paper, I freeze. It’s like I’m scared of not doing it justice, so why bother trying? Yes, I know, I can rewrite – I actually love rewriting! But to rewrite, you have to get the nightmarish first draft down on paper. And more often than not, I can’t make that happen.

So, what’s my point? Well, I have decided to start writing every day. Just twenty minutes or so, but I’ve got to start somewhere. So, with this in mind, I decided to google some writing exercises to get me started and came across Fear of Writing.

Now, I’ve tried talking to other people about how much I dislike writing, even though I want to write, but nobody ever seems to get it. It was a relief to find that I’m not the only person feeling this way.

I hope I can stick to my new schedule. I really want to get comfortable with writing again. And, most of all, I want to make up for lost time.

Wish me luck!