You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Rachel de Baere

You can’t force a writer who wants to procrastinate to sit down and write. Oh, yes, you can be clever and fool her. You can tell her she doesn’t deserve that pleasure of sitting down with her most beautiful pen, the one that when she picks it up feels so smooth and easy in her hand. You can tell her that her notebook is too pretty to write crap in so that she doesn’t even want to open it and muss the pages with her oily hand. You can tell her that writing about her deepest, darkest sorrow is only because she feels sorry for herself. No one cares really. No one wants to read her silly little woes, even if she knows how to use fresh, perfectly chosen words. And who wants to hear the same story over and over again? No one. You can remind her of this, and surely she won’t sit down and write.

Another way to keep her from writing is to tell her she needs to prepare to write – have a little ritual before she sits down. This, of course, comes after she had cleaned the kitchen, made the beds, answered the e-mails and cleaned out her closet. In the ten minutes she has to write, she must take a moment to prepare her psyche. She needs to find a candle. It has to be the right one today, the yellow one because she’s a little sad and needs some sunshine to cheer her up. Or maybe she needs the lavender one to be calm and get to her deeper self. She needs to take some time choosing the candle, then of course the pen. Then while she’s looking for the pen, she has to finish listening to the important news story on the radio.

And then, yes, her ten minutes are up and she has to get to her real work…

To be cont…