I can’t really pinpoint the moment my inspiration well dried up and left me living with a blinking cursor and a blank screen.
But it happened. Somehow, this thing I loved doing, just stopped being a thing I loved doing.
I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But I went from being excited about writing everyday, to avoiding it like it was exercise.
The worst part of not writing was that I’d also stopped daydreaming.
It was like losing a friend. But no matter how much I wanted to repair that friendship, it was too arduous a task. It was overwhelming. It was hard fucking work. And even though I missed it, I didn’t really miss it enough to work at it.
There was a time that writing didn’t feel like work; it felt like an escape–a mini-vacation. At one point, I had convinced myself that I had nothing to escape anymore…the bad marriage had ended. I didn’t need my daydreams to get me through life. But that wasn’t really true. When I first started writing, I was happily married. I wasn’t escaping anything. I had always been a daydreamer, I started writing to give my dreams a plot. To expand their worlds. And to give me a creative outlet. I loved creating.
And then, just like that, the feeling was gone. The love was gone. The daydreams were gone.
*poof*
Nothing.
My last book was published in 2010. That’s six years ago, y’all. That’s a long damn time in the world of writing. I had tried over the years to ignite a spark. I’d have a story idea, a niggle of a character, and I’d sit down and hammer out a couple of pages. And then I’d never look back. The niggles never grew into nudges. The ideas never seemed to stick with me. And I never went back to them.
Recently, I had the opportunity to ghost write a series. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve done because mentally, I wasn’t ready. I began to hate it. But not because I didn’t like the story or what I was working on. I hated it because it wasn’t mine. Because I had no control over the story.
Suddenly, after 3 months of writing something for someone else, I felt the desire to CREATE again.
A tiny drop of inspiration fell into my well and the echo it created was magnificent.
An idea formed. One that I couldn’t stop thinking about. And now, after 6 years…I am working on another book–with ideas pouring in for follow up books.
This feeling, is an addiction and I never want to kick this habit again.
