Writing With A Chronic Illness

Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to think. To have a coherent thought. To be able to form a sentence regardless of the pain that you're feeling. To feel motivated to finish a paragraph. To care enough to check for grammar. To feel desperate to create by smiting that nagging, blinking cursor on the screen.

It's easier to hide under a mountain of pillows, chuck some pills, and stare in a daze. It's easier to stuck in a good novel on my Kindle while my manuscripts suffers silently. My characters are left in suspended animation waiting on resolution to a conflict. Waiting for that inciting incident that's going to take their lives from order to chaos; a simple scientific lesson on entropy.

There are many days that I've sat and watched the cursor blink away at my face....taunting me that I'm not getting anything done. Then there are days that I've looked up and twenty pages have passed...and I'm still writing.

Those days I try to take advantage of because who knows when I'll be able to write again. I try not to think about other writers out there, churning out books, blogs, and articles like nothing. I try not to think of those writers who get up at seven am in the morning and write until lunch time. Or those writers that take their show on the road and have several pages completed daily. What are they doing that I'm not? Do I make excuses for myself because of my illness or do I realize that I have more time on my hands than I've ever had before?

I guess both are true. On days that I don't feel well, then I don't push it. Besides, whatever I do write comes out like crap anyway. I try to keep a pen nearby with my trusty legal pad and jot ideas down. Sometimes I like to "free write". That's when I just type whatever comes to my head. On days that I do feel okay, I try to write something...anything. This is why an outline is the best way to go when writing a book. I've been stuck on my current book so long I don't know what to do anymore. I get as lost as a toddler in a mall. Stuck and not loving it.

So excuses don't help anyone. I'm sure the writers who aren't slackers will tell you that. How else can you get anything done?