You Have to Write Every Day

That's the shitty part.
I know, I shouldn't be complaining. A writer?? Forced to write everyday?! The horror! The inhumanity!
But, let's talk candidly here. Even if you love something, you don't necessarily want to do it every day...
For example fitness enthusiasts. They love fitness, eat right, pick certain days for certain body parts (Monday: arms, Tuesday: legs, Wednesday: cardio . . .) but the key thing is that they rest. They pick one or two days a week to rest their body and let their muscles repair. To NOT do the thing that they love most. That's what I FEEL like I need to do sometimes. A mental rest day.
But that doesn't help. That's doesn't help the mentality that writing only comes with bursts of inspiration and periods of writers block. A writer can write. Always. Maybe not wonderful, jaw dropping material, but I don't believe in writers block. It's all in your head. Just.... go around it.
The mentality of the "inspiration writer" is baloney. You should write, something, anything, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, of a plot/character/setting/conflict. Because that's the only way I'm going to get better at this craft is by practicing every day. And dear god, editing.
So I didn't want to write today. That's what this whole blog post is about. Not writing. I'm writing about want to not write. Okay. That's enough now.
Practice makes better. Not perfect. I don't want to be a Hemingway or a JK Rowling. I don't even want to be a Suzanne Collins. I just want to write. And I want to write well. I view my writing as my legacy, my mark on this very large planet.
I wanted to share a little rant. Sometimes when I'm writing for a certain character I get into their mind set, how they would feel in this situation, etc. But mostly I think about what they would be thinking about. What are their day dreams? What do they say inside in reaction to others? What dreams do they have? And most of all: what dark thoughts to they possess, deep in their psyche?

So I started to write a scene. She's flash-backing, visiting her mom in Portland, home from college. But she's writing this flashback in her diary. So it's her, the character, writing this rant about the world ending. This has been on her mind for a long time, the point of it all. No one will remember, and why should they? She is just a small girl in a large planet. All the people who remember her are dead. She doesn't exist, really, to anyone. She's alive but no one knows, so what's the point of living? She's in a dark place in her mind already, so it's easy for her to go on this rant about the world ending, interrupting her own recap of the past.
In this world that's pretty common. There are more people alive, but she obviously doesn't know it. She thinks she is the last person standing, a trope that fascinates me. I've read multiple books where in the beginning the character believes themselves to be wholly alone, which in itself is terrifying.
Anyway. Below is the excerpt.


She stepped out of her car. Night had fallen recently, giving the early night a soft glow, with stars yet to show their faces. Her boots scraped against the wet concrete, while soft drops of rain trickle down from the leaves above, the wet dirt giving a pungent smell as she breathed, ah, in.

She was home. This soggy wasteland, as she liked to call it, or Portland, if you still called things the same like the old world. You don’t call a grocery store that anymore- it’s food. Period. Sporting goods stores are survival stores. Gun stores, security. All objects finite, every bullet that drops is one less bullet in the world. One day there will be no bullets left. There will be no more people to fight and die. Just an empty earth, beginning again. A million years will pass the earth will heal itself from its polluting hosts, the parasites that almost killed the earth. And then life will begin again, like it always has, and always will. And everything you know to be true, the famous people you remember, memories that you share with your family, it will be gone and nothing. No one will remember Lincoln or Eisenhower. No one will be left to pass on knock-knock jokes, or handshakes, or the bowing of the head in respect. There will be no more culture of this human race, these millennia that we have shared together. 

And you wonder why I can’t sleep at night.