The things that become interesting...

...when you have more important things to do.

I used to love writing stories when I was younger. Not that they were any good, but I used to love writing them. As I got into my late teens, I found a notebook from when I was 14 and it had all these story ideas I’d written down back then. I read over them. Some of them were really good. One of them was so good that I suddenly found myself wanting to work on it again and write it up. This was when I discovered my dilemma:

I was good at story ideas… But I was awful at writing them.

I’d found this passion for writing, without being able to write at a good standard. I wanted to be an author, but how can you have a bestseller when you can’t even use a comma correctly??

Anyway, I still tried. And failed. But I kept going with the writing. I liked my ideas too much to just let them go, so I carried on and tried to improve my writing skills.

Eventually, I became ok-ish at the writing side of things. Then this November, in the middle of my most stressful time at university, I decided that I was going to take part in NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and to take part, you have to write a 50,000 word novel, in 30 days.

I had never stuck with a story long enough to get past 5000, let alone 50,000.

I have no idea why I thought it would be a good idea but I did it anyway and for some miraculous reason, I finished writing my first ever novel within the 30 days. With support from others taking part and the daily word goal to get it done, I got it finished!

Great! I thought. I can do it now! I thought

I thought that because I’d been able to finish my first, I’d be able to write up another one of my ideas.

WRONG.

Without the discipline of the 30 day deadline, I failed in motivating myself to actually write. I discovered how easily distracted I am and procrastination is now my middle name. What was I doing to avoid actually writing? Everything.

I signed up to Polyvore. 

I began making style sets for my characters, thinking it would help, when actually all it did was make me addicted to Polyvore and resulted in online shopping of the fashions I was finding there.

I signed up to Wattpad. 

I thought it would be a good idea to put my first story on there, get some feedback and learn about writing. Instead, I ended up playing word games with other users in the forum and read other users’ amazing stories, making my own seem dull and lifeless in comparison.

I signed up to Pinterest. 

I wanted to use it to create inspiration and resourceful clipboards. I planned to add pictures of locations and events that I was going to make happen in my story. However, all I ended up doing was finding a bunch of overly filtered pictures of dip-dyed hair and suddenly wanted to dye my hair pretty colours.

So, to conclude, I have no motivation and discipline issues when it comes to writing. The past month has taught me that writing one novel doesn’t mean I’ll easily be able to write another one, it’s just resulted in me having way more online profiles on websites I’m now addicted to that actually aren’t helping me in any way what-so-ever.

Procrastination for the win! 

*crawls backs into bed with too much chocolate and pins four more pictures of hairstyles on Pinterest.*