On The Power Of The Appointment To Write

Is your writing self a bit stuck, a bit bored, a bit lost, a bit under the cosh of a deadline or others’ expectations?

A couple of days ago, novelist Lucy Mitchell said this on Threads:

Writing whatever piece of short fiction comes into my head for 15 mins every day is doing things for me. The rules - it must be fiction, any genre and I write for 15 mins max. I do it before work and I am finding I want to work on my novels in the evening. It’s also putting a smile on my face during the day at work

And I replied

Ah, yes, I had several months of doing that. It’s magical in what it does to the rest of your writing life, isn’t it!

It was a time when I had a lot of writing-adjacent work but no book contract, no main writing project in the works, and plenty of low-level domestic stress to gnaw away at my writing time and energy. I knew that one thing which would help immensely was to start a new writing project - but everything I tried seemed dull, trite or hopeless, or an excellent idea which made my heart sink every time I sat down to develop it.

I was beginning to wonder whether this writing life was sustainable, let alone what I wanted to do.

Image credit: Basho Horohoroto on Wikimedia Commons. The haiku reads in English: Quietly, quietly,/ yellow mountain roses fall –/sound of the rapids. (trs. Makoto Ueda)