Just Write, they say

The thing about wanting to be a writer is that you must write. I hear it all the time from everywhere, everywhere being the various writing groups and folks I run into in my daily life. They all tell me 'Just Write'. Okay... well, I set up this blog to have a place to write and now it has been empty for weeks while I've been trying to figure out just what to write about.

I found myself making all sorts of excuses, too. My house is too messy, my kids are too loud. I'm the person who needs to have their Bic pen caps perfectly aligned with the writing on the side of the pen, so you can imagine how a messy house or screaming children could be a distraction.

Then came the times I would write, click spell check and the computer would yell at me about passive voice. I would rack my brain trying to re-state something in a more interesting way. Well, what is my computer doing reading my work anyway?! I've since figured out how to consider the suggestion, then ignore the passive voice indicators. It actually took me weeks to get over. I nearly had to enter therapy for fear of speaking only in passive voice.

Even though I'm over worrying profusely about passive voice, it haunts me still. I was at dinner the other night with a group of people, not having thought of passive voice in days, giddily strumming up writing ideas in my head, half listening to what everyone was saying around me when a writing professor decided to  jump upon his personal soapbox and talk openly about how much passive voice irks him so! I couldn't believe it. Was this man psychic? Psychic, not only, but able to tap into out innermost fears and present them to us at a pub over spinach artichoke dip and hot wings?  He laid my passive voice fears right out there next to the ranch dipping sauce for the entire table to observe. I knew he would first, give me two choices and make me guess which sentence was passive, without my computer to bark at me, and then I knew he would hush the entire barroom while I tried to restate the sentence in a non-passive voice.

Of course, none of that actually occurred, but for the few seconds it took for my palms to sweat I worried. On our drive home later that evening discussing the actual meeting we attended before retiring to the pub, I replayed my passive voice fears inside my head. My friend was none the wiser about what I was actually thinking about, but she probably did wonder later why I wanted to talk about everything we had already discussed. (Yes, every once in a great while I get just a glimpse of what it must be like to be a man.)  

Passive voice fears aside, I know that I must sit at this computer and write. My children will not be quiet, my house will not remain clean for very long, my bic pens will have crooked lids and I must write.  

Besides knowing that I must stop making excuses for not writing something, even if it is just jibawacky like this, I know that I must write in order to get better at the art of writing. I visited a blog recently I used to read often but haven't been to in a year. It was actually good, the blogger's writing had improved. It was inspirational. This and the wonderful fact that I have magnificent friends and family breathing down my neck and yelling into my ears to write...  thank you and enjoy the suffering you have provoked, it's all your fault.