So you think you’re done for the night. You’re well into your third episode of Daredevil, red-eyed and binge happy. You move this party from the living room to the bedroom thinking, maybe one more episode and i’ll call it a night. Why not? You wrote a bunch today; progress on the project is behind but manageable and after today it ought to be back on track in another two. The kids are asleep, the pets are fed, the house is, well, still dirty but you earned the rest.
Then suddenly you remember you didn’t put in your ten.
So, here you are. You slide out the laptop, flip it open to a blank webpage, type the familiar sequence, and… The words are harder lately. That’s one of the problems with working on one type of thing exclusively for a long time. Myopia is a real thing that affects writers long before they realize what is happening. Sure, they start to build a kind of rhythm doing A, but B,C,D is for crap. So you take a deep breath and think about what you want to say that isn’t what you’re writing now. Sadly, there isn’t much. Time to recharge the batteries. Binge watch something different. Read something obscure. Find a couple of words you haven’t touched in years. Find a few you haven’t touched at all.
Being a writer–a thinker–is about stretching the limits of what you know and understand. It is about being willing to see every perspective and find the good and the bad in all of them. Sounds like the life to live.