Point of action tres — to catch my writing up with me.
Life roams forward regardless but when something happens there’s this delay between my brain and fingers that has lasted as long as 6 months, if not proved entirely fatal. It’s the bigger things of life, the smaller things have a smaller delay, maybe a day or two to a month, or death.
Whichever the thing, delay or death is a stress.
I always feel so much better once things are written.
As manager of myself (I take seriously this title, somewhat) I have determined 3 underlying causes for these delays:
- I over-complicate things. If I can have a simple sentence then it can have more words, get twisted and tied — it can be made to convey the whole thought before the full stop.
- I over-edit. I write and then I edit, re-edit, and edit again — this is mainly because everything is so complicated.
- I plan poorly — none to incomplete. I most usually jump in knowing what I want to write but discover halfway through that I don’t know what I knew, or have lost what I knew in amongst all the complication.
And these, in all, have this overlaying reason:
I lack confidence in my words
(Of course, poor planning is really its reason alone — bad administration.)
Writing is everything — blog posts, book, to things I’ll only see — and these delays effect all of it. Now the delays started when the whole Co-op thing kicked off — my ‘BLOG admin’ spreadsheet clearly shows a big hole during this period — and I suppose they formed because I had to sort my head out before I could give it words.
And then my writing just never caught up.
Always behind me, always last.
It doesn’t help that confidence as a rule is fickle. It comes and it goes, a bit like the tide but less briny. It’s always there (like the sea), always coming or going.
It fills and recedes.
Sometimes, a good bit of it gets trapped in a rock pool.
Just like by global warming, the sea of confidence can fill, which will in turn make the tides that bit higher — they’ll lap deeper around the rocks of our shore.
To do this, I need to…
… know what I know — I know it so I should be aware.
… say what I feel — in truth there is only conviction.
… not dwell on the knock — embrace and use it.
I don’t write that awful — I can turn a phrase and ruin one, too — but I do got bad habits that could do with a scrub.
Because building conviction in yourself is hard to achieve right off the bat, I’m going to start with the basics.
Writing — how do you do it? What? Letters? Adverbs? Huh?
I’m going to do some courses, do some learning — I’m going to dust off the ‘Grammar for Dummies’ (not real name) book I found during The Great Clear-out.
If my future is going to involve writing then the basics would be good to know.
