A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Twenty-Nine

When I first left school, I had a great deal of difficulty adjusting to being in charge of my own time as a writer.  In school, even beyond any specific assignments, I always had a general sense that I was expected to be writing, that what I produced would be valued and was desired.  Even as a graduate student, I had some challenges due to my neurodiversity, but I had a creative community and people who I could share and discuss writing together.  It was when I was out of school and not in that kind of environment all the time that I faced a real challenge in getting myself to write much of the time.  I had periods when I would write a great deal at once, over days or weeks, but those were rarities in between long periods of not writing anything, and even those projects I did work on, despite the fervor, were generally unfinished and abandoned.  It took a very long time for me to learn to manage my time to gain the importance of working each day on a longer piece until finished, not taking a break until the first draft had reached a conclusion.  For me, that was an important part of the process that got me through writing my first novel, but even once I did that, I had to learn, again, the importance, for me, of writing each day.  After the novel, I spent a long time on revision work and such, but didn't actually write, and at some point I wasn't even doing the revision.  I had the novel and was interested in getting it out there, but I wasn't actively writing.  It was only when I began writing poetry once more that it became a daily practice in a real sense.  That began more as a tool to get me back into writing poems than anything else.  I had not been writing poetry and wasn't confident in myself as a poet in the way I once had been, and so I forced myself to write a lot of poems.  Once I got started, I was able to find my voice again and realized that writing each day was an important act for me.  I have real difficulty with doing the things I need to on a daily basis, and writing each day was one of the things I found challenging in that way.  I wanted to do it.  I knew it was important, and I felt a real need to be working on my craft, but I wasn't doing it.  It was only by making it a daily priority that I was able to change that.  I know it is not the right way for everyone.  Many writers, and especially poets, whom I admire don't write each day, and that process works well for them.  It took me many years to get here, and I don't know that I could have done it any other way, though I do wish I had figured it out when I was younger.  I should just be glad for what I have now, I suppose, but that is never the way it really works.