Pushing Through

Tonight I was writing with my good friend, Becky, and I made the comment: “I would be such a good, professional writer – if it wasn’t for the writing part.”

Writing is hard.

Sometimes it flows out of me like liquid, the words pouring out onto the page and forming amazing sentences and stories that I barely knew were in my consciousness.

And at other times, those words feel like molasses, moving so slowly that each word is a struggle to get onto the page.

I don’t know why writing is like this. Why one day it can come so easily, and the next it is such a struggle. I do know that it’s worth the struggle. Most things worth doing are worth the struggle.

I have this strange belief that my struggle with weight loss is intrinsically connected to my struggle with writing. I don’t know why, but part of me really believes that I won’t be successful as a writer if I’m not successful losing weight. It’s weird, and doesn’t make a lot of sense, but on some level it does. I know that being dedicated and disciplined, even when the struggle is real and hard, helps to make something out of nothing. The dedication it takes to struggle through weight loss can lead to a healthier, more active life, and the struggle with the words on the page, even when they’re coming out only one word per minute, will lead to having something to show for all my hard work.

I’m trying to remind myself of that tonight. I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this month. Today is the first day of writing on a story that I hope will be at least 50,000 words long by the end of November. In order to do that, I need to write about 1600 words a day. I’m trying to write 2000. If Stephen King can write that many every day, then surely so can I, right? Yeah, because I’m just as cool as Stephen King. I can at least pretend to be as dedicated. It was a real struggle to get to 2000 words tonight. The words came slow. Just like molasses. But, I decided to be like Stephen King, and just fake it until I make it.