I don’t even know what to call this.

The hardest part of being a writer is the writing.

That may seem like an incredibly stupid statement, but there it is.

I love writing–or at least, I enjoy it. It’s fun for me. It’s play. But the idea of sitting and committing to writing for a set time every day is hard for me to follow through on. It’s a discipline that I haven’t learned yet. I too easily find reasons why I can’t.

You know what you call a writer who doesn’t write? Everybody else on your train-ride home. Writers write. Talkers talk.

I’m a talker who wants to stop talking and start writing.

The second problem I have with writing, besides the writing, is the what. I’ve been struggling lately with what to write. I seemed to have run out of things to say. Not that this generally stops me–I mean, you see me on Twitter, right? Most of what I say on Twitter is rubbish. Silliness. So many wasted words.

I sometimes wonder if I could take up some intense, devout vow of silence, in order to recapture my thoughts. Maybe if I forced myself to shut up for a while, it would make my next words actually mean something.

I don’t even know why I’m going on about this, other than I feel like I need to post SOMETHING. But I don’t feel like anything coming out of my head is worth a dime.

Except for this one thing that I want to work on when I get home, if I can. Something new. A bit of fiction that will plant the seed for a novel. I hope to show it to you soon, if I can hang onto it long enough to get it down on paper. But these ideas that float by on your walk between the train and the office are slippery fishes, and they will elude you when you actually want to grab them.

That idea, I’m excited about. Some of the other stuff I have on the back burner just feels a bit stale. So who knows.

Here’s the point, if it can be called such a thing: writers write. I want to write. But I have to want-to enough to actually want it more than the other things that distract me. Go ahead, try to diagram that sentence.

Time to go home. Writers, get writing. I’ll do my best to join you on that path tonight. But don’t wait up. The slippery fishes don’t hold still for long.