You have the passion to be a writer or a daily blogger. It’s there gnawing at you every moment of every day until you give in and start writing. If you’re not writing, you’re thinking about writing, you’re jotting down ideas, you’re thinking up great blog posts, new angles to share with your readers—this is your life; you are passionate about being a writer—you are a writer.

So what happens when the passion goes to sleep? Has the flame of desire completely gone out and killed all your enthusiasm about writing? Not necessarily. Often, you just need to take a break. Everyone else gets a vacation, there’s no reason a writer can’t take a vacation from work.

Is this another post about writer’s block? Not really. I’m not even sure what writer’s block is, even though I’ve written about it on numerous occasions. I’m starting to think only fiction writers get “the block.” As a freelance writer there isn’t a book or magazine I can’t open and not get an idea brewing. I can write about topics that I have no interest in at all—and I’ve done that. I think it may boil down to passion.

What is passion and what do you do when it just isn’t there? Passion is “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate“. The dictionary also relates it to strong sexual desire.

Can we relate writing to sex and relationships? I think we can. Writing is like a long love affair or relationship. After awhile, and unless you’re still in your early twenties, you don’t have sex on the brain constantly. It doesn’t mean the relationship has gone bad—it just means other things are allowed to occupy your thoughts. The passion is still there, it’s just taken a back seat for the time being—sometimes you’re just not in the mood. The passion a writer has is the same way. It doesn’t die; it just takes a back seat.

We all have days that we’d rather scrub the toilet or fix the lawn mower than to sit down and write (or have sex). It’s human nature and it’s inevitable. If you’re like me, you may feel like your passion has failed you. It hasn’t, it just needs a break.

How do you get it back? Well, after you scrub the toilet and fix the lawn mower, you write. I know, that’s my answer for everything—but until you try it, you don’t know how powerful it really is. Simple? Not always. I had to force myself to sit down and write—but once the words started flowing it gave me an awesome feeling of power over the passion (or lack thereof).

It doesn’t matter if your passion is waning or if you have full blown writer’s block—the key to this writing gig is to write. My personal journal is full of entries about not wanting to write—often I have a whole week full of entries like this:

“I don’t want to write today. I’m supposed to be a writer, but how can I even call myself a writer if I don’t want to write. Writers are supposed to write—but I’m not writing. I’m sitting here whining into my journal over not writing and not wanting to write. Why don’t I want to write today? No one else is having this problem, they’re all writing.”

When you sit down and write about not writing or even asking yourself how you can call yourself a writer when you aren’t writing—there’s something about seeing your own words rip you to shreds that gets your butt planted in the seat and your fingers on the keyboard. The muse doesn’t like to be scolded.

The muse is like a child. It needs love and affection, but sometimes it needs to be scolded too. When you tell someone they can’t do something, they often become hell-bent on doing the thing they can’t do—just because. It’s like a challenge and they will rise to the challenge. The muse works the same way—if you rip him/her to shreds for not allowing to do what you do, she will usually prove to you that she is still there and willing to work.

If you can’t find the words to write, just write about how bad you suck at being a writer. Sometimes it’s good to piss the muse off.

Be sure to check out my guest post at Storyfix.com: Writing and the Laws of Motion. If you’ve found me through Larry’s site, thanks for the visit and welcome to The Stafford Scribe!

If you arrived here through Blogging Tips to see how often I update this poor little blog. . .Welcome to my World.

Was it a ploy to get you here through trickery? Not really, it was more sinister than that. It was actually a ploy to make me update the thing.

If you arrived here by other means, Welcome to my World.

At the time of this writing, I have no title for this post or even a clue what this post will be about. A blog post should be specific and cover one topic—or so I’m told. I don’t always follow the rules though. I’m a writer; we’re also told we can break the rules—to a degree anyway.

I think I’ll cover a few thoughts I’ve had lately, a few blog posts I’ve read and why they may have sparked these thoughts, and I may even throw in something useful and meaningful. Don’t hold your breath, just read. . .or click away, you have that option too.

My Life as a Writer:

Once upon a time—is that too cliché? Well, once upon a time there was a writer who loved to write fiction. She had stories, scenes, characters, plots—you know all the stuff a writer is supposed to have.

One day as she was traveling along the writing highway, she came across a blog post, an ad, or maybe it was a hobo with a sign, but whatever it was it said something like, “Make Money Writing.” What a concept, huh? So she clicked (which means it must have been an ad or a blog post and not the hobo with the sign) and she discovered she could make money now—not down the road after writing her great novel, going through the edits, revisions and submissions, she could make money now.

What was the catch? It was all non-fiction. Hey no problem. She can write during the day and make money, and write her great novel at night. It only takes balance and a good juggling act.

Well it turned into all non-fiction writing. The muse didn’t mind at first, she needed a break. She didn’t have to plot, scheme, or come up with a fancy way to describe a decadent hot caramel, chocolate latte. This was cool.

But one day, while taking a nap in a tree, the poor muse fell out and broke both her arms, her legs, and cracked her skull. This infuriated the muse because she had to take more time off to recover.

Years later, which wasn’t that long ago, the writer realized how much she missed the muse, but the muse was still recovering—a very slow process.

Once the muse discovered that she was needed, she started making progress towards recovery. Some days, just for amusement though, she would torture the writer and not give her anything to say.

The moral of the story? There really isn’t one. It’s taken much longer to heal the muse than it should have. Enter NaNoWriMo.

My First NaNaWriMo:

This is my first year to participate. I knew something dramatic would have to happen to fully recover the muse and get my butt planted in the seat with some good old fashioned fiction.

Before NaNo, I didn’t really have a clue what I would write for my novel. I had a character idea in my head from a writing prompt I did over the summer and that little lady has bugged the crap out of me.

All of the blogs I get time to read is done through email—it’s like magic—they come in the middle of the night—or early morning and go directly to their specific folder. This way, if the headline catches my attention, I can read it. If it doesn’t grab me—well I get to it eventually. One catching headline appeared in my email. I had to read it immediately; it was related to NaNo, which would start soon.

As I was reading through it, I thought I was screwed. The advice was solid and made perfect sense, but I hadn’t planned for any of it. But, as always, Larry has a solution. Of course I sort of botched his solution and came up with something I could do. (I’ll link to the post in a minute—patience grasshopper.)

Larry believes in having a plan, as opposed to organic writing (and you’ll get his feelings on both if you read his blog enough). I was going in organically—it worked before my muse got broken, why won’t it work now? Well, because the muse also matured as she healed. She liked the idea of a plan. Okay, great! I’m screwed now because I’ve never written an outline or planned a story out. I’ve let it flow—organically.

Well, with barely two days left to plan for NaNo, I made a simple outline—it contained a beginning, a middle and an end; no juicy stuff in between. I was thrilled with it. I’m still thrilled with it. The first few days I was just happy to be writing my passion again. As yesterday dawned (Day Four) I started having a small panic attack. I needed a scene change, a direction or something and it wasn’t planned. I was doing timed sprints with two other writers. We were going to write for twenty minutes this time—and I had nothing.

What did I do? I decided to just wing it—or go organic as Larry calls it. Well something amazing happened. At the end of 20 minutes I had written 1640 words. I have no idea where they came from, but one thing I did notice as I was writing and I couldn’t stop it—my character took over and changed my plan.

The moral of this story? I really like the idea of a plan and using an outline. I will learn to do this better. But at the same time, you have to let your characters go where they’re going too. Don’t beat yourself up if he/she does something you didn’t have planned out.

The link? Oh, you’re waiting for the link. You have no patience do you?

Okay, I’ll give it to you, but you have to promise that you’ll read other posts at Larry’s blog. Why? Because I said so!  And the fact that he gives really solid advice is a plus too.

About NaNoWriMo – Three Ways to Thrive, One Sure Way to Suck

I promised links to a few blog posts didn’t I? Well, this one became such an epic tale, I should hold off sharing the others. Hey, it gives me another reason to update this thing in the near future—you can’t blame a writer for that. J