When Wen Writes Things

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What's blocking me?
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What's blocking me?

I seemed to have cornered my saboteurs into my writing

Wela Quan
May 6
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What's blocking me?
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It’s not clear what’s blocking me.

Something is blocking me and I am not sure what. I seemed to have lost my writing mojo in that I haven’t actually written anything substantive in awhile. What is blocking me?

I don’t really know. I seemed to have cornered all my saboteurs into this one primary aspect of my life and they seem to all be gathering and hanging out there. Every time I try to make progress on Book People, I feel not good enough or that it is an insurmountable goal and that I can’t do it. It’s strange because I generally don’t feel that way about anything. I am usually pretty optimistically confident about being able to do a decent job at pretty much anything I put my mind to. But this feels different for some reason. I am standing in my own way.

My writing mentor has asked me to investigate why I am feeling this way and I can’t really put a finger on it. So far the only thing I’ve come up with is that every time I think about Book People and how big in scope it could be, I freak out and panic. It’s like I am expecting myself to write a debut book that will be a Pulitzer winner and because it’s not going to be it’s easier to just be stuck. I procrastinate endlessly when I’m supposed to be writing. I do things like online shopping or putting more hours in at the day job.

The good news is I generally feel pretty good about having driven the saboteurs out of most of the other aspects of my life. The bad news is that in doing so, I seemed to have driven them directly into the primary box that holds my dreams and purpose. This stuff can never be easy can it?

So, what am I to do? I think I am supposed to just write through it. This week I attempted to “write” through it and instead all I did was spend all my time editing the two paragraphs I wrote over and over again.

My writing mentor even gave me permission to write this book from my own point of view which was revelatory. I kept thinking I need to write a hardcore investigative book about the company and the people but no one says I have to do that.

So maybe I need to just write random shit. And try to unblock myself that way. The struggle is real and endless.

I expect to get comments back from Prof. Kadri on my torts book next week though so that’s good. There’s still so much pushing I have to do for my picture books. I will get those out this summer. That would be at least something.

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