I Failed At Writing Today

What I learned from an evening with profound writer’s block.

Photo by Eternal Seconds on Unsplash

Today was not a good writing day.

It wasn’t a particularly bad day otherwise, but it was a horrible writing day. Horrible. Absolutely not productive. In fact, what’s the opposite of productive? Don’t ask me, my wordplay skills are non-existent today.

I opened Medium draft after Medium draft, Google doc after Google doc, and all of it drew a blank. Heck, even this fleeting, last-minute, stream of consciouness exercise as an attempt to get something down almost didn’t get finished.

But you know what? It’s totally okay to suck at writing some days.

Here’s why:

The Doubts Crept In Around 10 pm

Usually, by 10 at night, I’m in a flow. I’m grooving. The story isn’t perfect, but it’s coming out. I’m spitting words into the document. They come to my head, I let them out. Then, the next day, I edit them. Usually, this process is spinning by 10 pm.

Today, it didn’t. At 10 pm today, I was sitting on my ass, staring at a blank screen, and I had 5 documents open with 5 different headlines. Each of them felt more wrong than the next, and besides a few little personal anecdotes, I didn’t have any stories to tell. I…