It’s Day 6 of the 14 days to a kickass writing habit. Yay!
Today was hard. We were asked to think about our writing habit (or lack thereof) and figure out the conditions that make our writing thrive.
Bingo. The root of my writing problems and the reason for signing up for this course in the first place:
1. Right place – um. See below.*
2. Right time – while I like the idea of being a morning person, I am distinctly not a morning person. But I’m also not a night person. Maybe I am a potato person, preferably toasty warm and accompanied by cheese.
3. Right amount – more than I’m doing now…?
*BELOW: I work a desk job full time. Except that desk job has been from the tiny 100cm x 100cm Ikea table in a one bedroom flat’s combined living room/dining room/extension of the one-butt kitchen for the past 13.5 months. I can’t quite scoot my chair out all the way because then I’d bump into the built in shelving and cabinets, disturbing the books a-flutter and wine bottles a-chime and espresso machine a-hiss. And then there’s me, the bumbling clumsy human with my puny writing needs.
And staring at a laptop at home for 7-8 hours a day definitely takes the shine off the privilege of spending extra time per day staring at a different laptop to do writing.
HOWEVER.
All the grand, beautiful things done in this world are done by tired people making time out of nothing.
So I hereby promise (writing this out to y’all to hold myself accountable) that I’m going get up early this coming week. That’s right. I am a goblin in the morning, but so help me, I’ll cling to my coffee for dear life and squeeze in 25-30 minutes of uninterrupted writing time before work/studying for financial exams/blah blah blah.
Giddyup.
P.S. This is where I tell you about my greatest writing inspiration: The Boy. My fiancé. The scruffy dimpled Australian of my dreams. This guy woke up at or before 5am every morning to finish the draft of his novel to meet a deadline. That deadline was a competition. And that competition was the Fogarty Literary Prize. He landed the longlist, which became a shortlist, which became a publishing contract, which became a fully-fledged shiny Where the Line Breaks published by Fremantle Press in April 2021. Which is now flitting around on Instagram with happy book people, in snapshots of book reviews, and one particularly gorgeous human made a special torte in its honour and now I’m craving cake. But his Instagram says it best (click the pic):
To sum, you never know what will happen. But I know for certain what happens if you sit around feeling guilty for not writing: nothing.
Katherine Allum | Writer & Artist 