Making excuses is my forte. I’m too busy. Life is too overwhelming. I’m the mom to a 12-year-old. I’m still in my first few years teaching, so I spend all of my creative energies on coming up with lesson plans. I’ve never written anything longer than a short story. I’ve only published in small, practically unknown places. I’m not good enough of a writer to do this. I’m only 26, so I’ve got time. I’ll do it later. I really want to watch that episode of The Crown on Netflix right now. I’m too busy reading. I need to exercise.
These are all excuses that I’ve made so that I didn’t have to write. It’s not that I dislike writing; I adore it. But it’s so easy to fall into the trap of saying that I’ll write later because… place any excuse on the face of this planet here. I know so many people that have said, “I want to write a book.” A very small percentage of those people actually ever do that. Just yesterday, I learned that my Grandpa always wanted to write a book. I never even knew that. I didn’t have any idea that he wrote at all. Perhaps that is because he never actually did it.
I look up to my Grandpa in a lot of other ways, but I don’t want my grandkids down the road not to know that I’m a writer. I want them to read the books that I wrote. I want them to understand that Nana Heather did what she loved: created stories. For that to happen, I have to stop making excuses, and write!
Also, I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree with a composite major of English Education and Creative Writing, so you’d think that I would actually want to utilize what I learned during my time in college. I could let the creative writing part of my degree fall by the wayside because my “career” is teaching. I don’t want to do that. My life is busy, but here’s what I decided: Even though it’s easy to make those excuses, I needed to stop, and start writing NOW.
I made the goal to write 5 days a week back in January. Since then, I have come up with an idea for a novel that I’m stoked about. Today I just reached 20K words with that project. How did I do that? I started writing. Incredible what happens when you swat away those nasty excuses. Sometimes I only write for 30 minutes, other times I am able to write for longer. The important thing I have learned is to just write. Some days it is easier than others, and I’ve definitely had to slap myself silly when those thoughts and excuses come to mind, because they still come.
The Subplots of Life 