Thankfully, I have a full life with many blessings and much to be grateful for. I am truly never bored as I always have something to do or somewhere to go. In fact, I can no longer keep up with the numerous hobbies I collected over the years because I’ve replaced them with new ones. Still, there has been something missing in my life, and I’ve been avoiding it like the plague. Just one thing for which I am embarrassed to admit. Other than my monthly blogs, I haven’t written anything in more than three years.
Sure, I can lie to myself and say that making money (my day job) got in the way of doing the one thing that immediately fills me with joy. And I have been guilty of lying for a long time. I could have—and should have—made the time to write. Just like I used to do. Just one hour a day. Time management. But I opted to occupy my spare time with other things, like learning a couple of new languages. The fact is, any activity one performs requires habit, which induces muscle memory. And that goes for writing as well. The moment the habit of daily writing goes away is the moment muscle memory disappears. Think of what happens when you stop going to the gym. The habit wanes and muscle memory—as well as muscle density—dissipate.
As the final days of June came to an end last week, I concluded that I needed to get back to writing. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever. Novels, short stories, features. I promised myself I would sit down at my computer and start writing again July 1. Even if I wrote just one sentence a day.
Promises Kept
Indeed, I kept my promise on the first day of July, opening the documents folder in my laptop to reacquaint myself with what lay inside. Seriously, it had been over three years since I looked at any of the saved, yet-to-be-published manuscripts. In fact, I had forgotten how many manuscripts I had stored on the hard drive (three, which is in and of itself insanity of the highest order). Most people never complete one book in their lives, much less six, which I have. Needing inspiration—I had no flipping idea what I wanted to write about—I planned to open the first document I saw, just to see if it triggered any creativity, got my creative juices flowing, to get over my writer’s block. I couldn’t get over the fact that there were three complete manuscripts of novels I’d written in the past five years, just sitting inside my computer. Many had been edited a few times, ready to be published, and one—the one that popped out to me—had been edited just once. I know this because I had documented the date of that first edit at the top of the document. The novel’s working title: “Plague.” How fitting.
Inspiration Induction
Yes, I intended to get inspired by reading a few chapters of Plague—a novel itself inspired by the recent pandemic—but instead, I started editing it. I could attribute my default to editing as laziness or fear of starting something new, but I soon reasoned in my cluttered mind that starting a new novel while three unpublished novels sat in my laptop was ridiculous. Once again, I needed to prioritize my goals. Why had I churned out three novels in the past five years with no intention of having anyone read them? How could anyone read them if they simply remained in my computer?
Certainly, I needed to re-read Plague to recall all the characters and events within. I wasn’t sure if I wrote the final chapter and if I did, I couldn’t remember how it ended. Did I leave an open-ended cliffhanger so that a sequel would be in order? Did I kill off most of the characters? Indeed, I am glad I decided to edit Plague before writing another novel because I found a lot of typos just in the first 16 chapters! Sheesh! Thank God I am not perfect.
Memories Elicit Joyfulness
I’m enjoying editing Plague as it brings back great memories of creating the protagonists and ancillary characters and the events that entangled them as well as how I wove disparate characters into a story spanning two continents. It has renewed my faith in my creativity and in eventually authoring a new novel. But that will have to wait as I have committed to completing the edit, even if it takes me till the end of the year.
My final thought: Avoiding writing like the plague was never a clever idea.