But I Don’t Want To …

… write today. I don’t feel like it. I haven’t been feel­ing like it for a cou­ple of weeks now.

As par­ents, we often hear our chil­dren say “but I don’t want to” do what­ever is required of them at that moment. It might be clean­ing their room, com­plet­ing their home­work, per­form­ing chores around the house. It might be some­thing as seem­ingly sim­ple as going to school on a Mon­day morn­ing. We’ve all heard the whin­ing, groan­ing, com­plain­ing. “But I don’t waaaaaaaaant to, Mom.”

What do you do if you feel that way about writing?

The answer depends, of course, upon whether we are talk­ing about a pro­fes­sional writ­ing assign­ment or sim­ply writ­ing for your own blog. If, like me, you blog merely for fun, enter­tain­ment and to have a cre­ative out­let, there are no dra­con­ian con­se­quences asso­ci­ated with tak­ing a break.

For awhile, I was a mem­ber of team blog devoted to the topic of writ­ing. I con­sid­ered that a pro­fes­sional com­mit­ment, even though I vol­un­teered my ser­vices. So that meant that I had an oblig­a­tion to deliver one post per week. My per­sonal value sys­tem man­dated that I pro­vide the best qual­ity con­tent I could.

Sure, I could have e-mailed the other team mem­bers and said, “I don’t have a post this week. Could you pub­lish some­thing for me?” I could even have told them that I don’t feel well enough to write today which would not be entirely untrue since I do have a cou­ple of phys­i­cal issues, includ­ing a mid­dle ear infec­tion, that have adversely impacted my abil­ity to approach this task with enthusiasm.

In fact, because I’ve been a bit under the weather this week­end, I spent some time doing some­thing I vir­tu­ally never do. I actu­ally sat and watched tele­vi­sion — HBO’s new series, “in Treat­ment,” to be exact. It stars Gabriel Byrne, Dianne Wiest and Blair Under­wood. I have long been a fan of all three and am par­tic­u­larly enam­ored with Gabriel Byrne, who gives an absolutely mes­mer­iz­ing per­for­mance. If you were a fan of “The Sopra­nos” in part because of the scenes with Lor­raine Bracco as Dr. Jen­nifer Melfi, Tony Soprano’s shrink, and Peter Bog­danovich who por­trayed Dr. Melfi’s ther­a­pist, Elliott Kupfer­berg, you will love the full episodes cen­tered around Byrne’s treat­ment with his for­mer super­vi­sor, played by Wiest. Their tumul­tuous pro­fes­sional his­tory is a multi-layered back story that gives con­text and depth to the issues about which Byrne decides to resume therapy.

If you are a fic­tion writer look­ing for inspi­ra­tion or new story ideas, the char­ac­ters por­trayed “in Treat­ment” might very well pro­vide plenty of both.

I decided to use the way I’m feel­ing tonight and my own gen­eral writ­ing lethargy of the past cou­ple of weeks to illus­trate this point: Writ­ers write. Period. They write whether they feel like it or not. They write for a wide vari­ety of rea­sons, some­times moti­vated by the need to put bread on the table, some­times by the fact that they have made a com­mit­ment and refuse to dis­honor it. Some­times they write because, as I am prov­ing even as I type these words, the very act of doing some­thing you didn’t feel like doing in the first place can pull you out of the dol­drums and help you regain your enthu­si­asm for the task.

Open­ing up a browser win­dow, log­ging in, and work­ing on this entry is already prov­ing ther­a­peu­tic for me. The cre­ative juices are begin­ning to flow again and ideas for blog posts are swirling in my head. Per­haps my slump is com­ing to an end.

So in other words, what’s the best thing you can do when you find your­self say­ing “but I don’t want to”?

Write.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writing

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