Why Writers Fail, Part One: Don’t Open The Ark of the Covenant!

ark-of-the-covenant-relief

So you’ve finally found the resolve to sit down and get some writing done. You’re seated there, fingers at the ready, your will is steely and strong. You start typing. It comes easy at first, and you’re pounding at the keyboard. Then it starts to get harder.  You grind to  a slow, painful slog, word after word. You falter. Doubt creeps into your mind. This sentence sucks, and so does this paragraph. In fact, so does the whole, stupid idea. Great satan’s beard it’s turning into monkey dung right before your eyes! You’re drowning in it. Monkey dung up to your eyeballs. You’re desperate for relief, but you can’t leave the desk. You promised. This time would be different. This time you would finish something. But OH THE PAIN! SOMEBODY PLEASE SHOOT ME! ARGGHHAAGGHH!!! Continue reading

Bridge Trolls and Other Writers

We’re as ubiquitous to the profession as a Weenie Bite Competition is to a Biker Rally: Non-writing writers. The corpses of our stillborn ideas and best intentions lay dying a slow death in computer file folders across the land. They languish, starved and forgotten in the yellowed pages of countless notebooks. They haunt the collective creative consciousness of us all; not quite dead, but not among the living either. We are the slobbering, warty bridge trolls who live in self-imposed exile beneath the literary highway overpass; a highway traveled by those far better than us. And by far better, I don’t mean smarter or more gifted or  funnier or more educated or  better looking (though don’t rule it out); Continue reading