Short Stories for fun

Why Daily (a blog post) | Story a day # 18

Okay...

So I've done this daily thing for eighteen days now.

Why bother? You may ask?

Aren't they all shit? The bolder ones of you may add.

Nobody reads it anyway.

No, wait. That last one wasn't you (because it means at the very least that YOU are reading this). Nope, that last one was actually my self-doubt.

One of the very thinks I try to combat with this daily story practice.

Because that's exactly what it is. Practice.

I first encountered the idea of writing daily back in around 2017 - 2018? I can't remember. My old PC hard drive froze along with the old manuscripts and any other evidence that I've been doing this for years (on and off). 

It started when I came across Julia Cameron's book. The Artist's Way. Back then I've been struggling with what people would call Writer's Block (an oversimplification of a multi-faceted issue, but I digress). Julia's advice in that book was pretty simple. I remember there being two of them, but I only remember one, and that's the one that stuck with me and led me to wherever I am today.

Julia called it the Morning Pages. It's very simple. In order to unlock the voice inside of you that wants to come out, write three pages worth of words every morning after waking up. Longhand one a piece of paper - a legal pad if you want something precise. Absolutely no erasures, everything written on the page has permanence. You don't have to overthink. It doesn't have to make sense. 

You just have to write. 

That's it.

Easy enough isn't it?

Of course, I struggled at first. But writing random words on a piece of paper? How hard can it be? Well, It wasn't so hard. And none of my writings had any value to any audience whatsoever, but to me it opened up another world. 

You see, I was writing. The method that I was doing back then on my three little pages of legal pad was no different from the method used by my favorite authors like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. In a span of a few minutes every morning I was being a writer, and I was experiencing what those other professionals that I admired so much were doing on a consistent basis.

I kept at it. For some time. Inevitably life goes on. But my love for reading stories and telling them did not wane. I wanted to create stories. I wanted to follow characters, see what they are made of. I wanted to create worlds. Worlds that I would like to be in and I would like to read about, but everybody is too busy not writing them.

So perhaps. By a long shot. Maybe, I could be the one to write them.

Well, I failed to do that practice consistently. I wasn't even able to fill out a full notebook. My left hand ached from writing longform. My living room wasn't a classroom. Work got in the way. Also video games. Lots and lots of video games.

These are few of the things that get in the way of being a writer. And yeah, they're perfectly fine reasons. They are, after all, several facets of life. Experiencing other things is quite nice, and I harbor no feelings of regret for them.

But then came the emptiness. 

I don't know how to describe it. It's like living another life as an impostor. The feeling is weird, but laying it down it does make sense.

Back when I was seventeen, I made myself a promise that I would write songs and that would be what I would be doing for the rest of my life.

A few years after that and life got in the way. I told myself that if I got to thirty and this songwriting thing didn't turn out well then I would jump off to being a writer.