Perhaps I should just make this an official routine.
Think about ideas for interesting, diverse articles during the day, then settle for a 25-minute freewriting session when night comes and I'm left with no time to do anything substantial [this will change tomorrow, however -- for those of you interested, I'm going to be publishing the long-awaited Part 2 to my LSD-dealing experience, so read the 1st and get caught up because you won't want to miss it].
I really shouldn't complain too much, though. As I mentioned in my last freewriting post, even just committing a relatively small period of time to writing as a daily practice is a big step up from where I was before all this (hint: it involved around 0 minutes of freewriting per day). So I take comfort in that. Progress, as some like to say, is not linear--it goes up, down, left, right, quickly, slowly, around the corner and back, and sometimes...well, sometimes it just doesn't go at all.
Honestly, though, I think accepting that non-linearity of progress is ironically one of the more effective things you can do to actually make that productivity curve just a bit straighter and more upward-facing. Because when you're not spending all your time worrying about what you've done or what you still have left to do, you spend a lot less time associating this act of writing--something which ideally should be a giver of joy and clarity and peace--with the negative feedback loops of guilt and anxiety, which only serve to paralyze you, keep you where you've been.
I guess the bottom line, really, is about making writing something you want to do. Because frankly, even as someone who wants to make a career and a life out of writing, I sure as hell dread it sometimes. Maybe even fear it a little bit. Like right now. I have 5 minutes left in my freewriting session, and all I can think about is how little I've written--and how poorly it's written in the first place, and how my neck is cramping right now and I want to get in bed and I'm tired of all this thinking and typing and this is all just so frustrating, anyway. I'd bet I'd feel better if I just stopped.
And that's how it goes. That is how negative emotional associations and negative thought patterns pile up and build on each other, further distracting and annoying you until the most attractive solution is to just stop the writing altogether. And that, unlike meaningful work, is an easy habit to build. Takes nothing to continue, and everything to stop.
But that's just inertia. That's physics. Law. You gotta remember--I gotta remember--there's layers to this. No one starts one day, and becomes a master the next. But plenty of people start one day, and finish the next. So here's to hoping--with one more consecutive freewriting session under my belt--that it won't be me. That I will not start and stop within the span of a fly's lifetime, victim yet again to the process I seem capable of describing, and incapable of avoiding. See you tomorrow for Part 2 of my story.