Ups and Downs of Writing

More and more I've been reading and in everything I read that talks about the life of the Writer I've been seeing how life goes up and down.  Not just in life itself, everything there could stay exactly the same, but the writer is one of those people who suffers.  We suffer from the art of self doubt, overconfidence, depression, elation... we go up and believe we can do anything and then the next moment we're down where nothing can work and all we can write is to be thrown in the trash.  Take heart though, if you're a writer reading this who recognizes this in yourself as well, we're definitely not alone.  It's something that most writers seem to suffer from.

This week I got banned from the Writer's Digest forum (permanently and my IP address was banned so I can't register with a different name) for "spamming".  I've emailed the guy they said to but I haven't heard anything from him. Fortunately!  As I just went and checked again to see if I as still banned, I found that not only am I no longer banned but that it was an admin problem for the power going out that resulted in a great many people being banned who should not have been.  I'm back to full access.  Yay!

That incident did however lead me to start reading more of the writing books that I've been slowly collecting for the last little while.  And that's how I discovered today's topic.  There's always things you NEED to do if you're going to be a writer.  The first rule of writing is WRITE so you always, always need to be doing that, no matter how down you are or how up you are.  You've got to find a way to keep writing.  However you should also know that the ups and downs are normal, that if you keep working through them eventually you'll come up with your novel.  Once your novel's done then you can start editing and finally you can get to the point where you let your novel fly free on its own.  When that happens good!  Try not to let it get you too down and move on to the next novel.  Keep writing.  Right now that rule's the hardest one for me to keep doing.  There's no good reason I haven't written a word in two weeks, but I haven't and I am failing badly at rule number one.  At the very least I've been keeping up with this blog which now has a schedule!  (yay!) so there's a reason to write all the time on something.  Now I just have to figure out how to get my butt moving on the rest of the chapters.