Sit Down, Shakespeare!

I recently read/perused a book called The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook, which really isn't a handbook at all and more like a series of questions about writing, answered by around fifteen writers, most of them pretty big names like Rick Moody and Haruki Murakami. I noticed two main things in the perusal of this book: everybody's process is different, and almost everybody has trouble sitting down to write.

This includes we here at Blogagaard, as well. You'd think after eleven novels and such we'd be automatic sit down machines, ready and eager to start jotting away each fine day, but, alas, this isn't true. Oh, we'll sit down alright, but only to check our email, or surf the net, or to play a video game. When it comes to actual writing, a portion of our brain flees from laboring and distracts us any way it can. In his book The War of Art Steven Pressfield calls this urge to distraction Resistance and tells us that Resistance doesn't give a shit your project, your creation, and will prevent you from creating something by any and all means necessary, and that each day is a new battle with Resistance and you will only win by sitting down and getting to work.

I think that idea blows away a hundred interviews with a hundred famous authors, and that the real secret miracle is that anything beautiful is created, ever. I mean, shit, I could barely sit down long enough to write this blog post!