Tricking yourself into writing

by Claudia Blood

I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I have to trick myself into writing.

Yes, I want to be a writer, but writing is HARD. Daydreaming about stories is almost as satisfying as writing them down and far easier. There’s none of that messy grammar or infestation of typos or the pull of everyone’s ideas on the ‘right’ way to write.

Half of you read that sentence and thought ‘your grammar sucks’, the other half thought ‘oh she used the rhetorical device called polysyndeton’, the other half didn’t notice. See? So hard.

But, sigh, I really want to be a writer even with all the rejection, self-doubt, and getting on lists because of my internet searches.

The first trick I tried to make myself write was giving myself a deadline. Yeah, that didn’t work. A year had passed and I still hadn’t finished anything. Started?…