Meg Dowell Writes

Top 10 #WriterProbs I Hate to Love

Because I have another week of Christmas Break (and am about ready to head back now, not because I don’t love my family or my cat or rarely if ever leaving the house but because I AM RUNNING OUT OF THINGS TO DO) I have been making a lot of lists. List of things I need to buy before I leave, lists of things I still need to do before classes start – I even made a list of all the things I need to make a list for. I’m serious. THAT’S HOW MUCH FREE TIME I HAVE.

Lucky you – you get to embark on this fabulous list-making journey with me! I now present to you my latest Top 10 list – Top 10 #WriterProbs I Hate to Love. We all have them, and they’re different for everyone. Here are mine:

Getting an idea as I’m falling asleep. I CAN’T HANDLE THIS. Before I got old and college tried to eat me (me in my entirety, not just my brain or my sanity) I could force myself to get back out of bed to at least jot something down in a notebook. Nope. Now I just let it invade my dreams and hope I remember it all in the morning.
Not remembering an idea I had the night before by the time I wake up the next morning. Makes me want to punch my pillow, except not really, because I happen to respect the inanimate objects I own (and honestly, I only have two pillows and an elephant to sleep with, so ruining those relationships would mean sleeping alone. #SingleLadyProbs. But that’s another Top 10 list I haven’t made yet.)
Having too many projects at once. Right now I’m managing two blogs (one of which is set for launch in February – don’t panic, I’m not keeping anything from you), cranking out at least an article a week for College Lifestyles, putting together other articles for other unspoken media outlets – and pretty soon I’ll be writing papers about Shakespeare. SO MANY WORDS.
Typing too fast and having to backspace to the beginning of a sentence to fix it. Do you ever have this problem? Obviously I do. Silly fingers.
Not being able to name a character after someone I know. I start basing that character off them, and in some cases that’s just not okay. Especially if it’s an evil character. None of my friends are evil. I hope.
Involving too many characters in one of my stories. I sometimes have a hard time narrowing down which characters to keep and which to save for another project. The world does have a lot of people in it but even God has to get overwhelmed sometimes. You can only focus on so many people at once.
Getting so lost in my story that I forget I’m not part of it. Unlike my characters I still have to eat, and sleep, and shower at least once a day, and let’s be real, all that coffee doesn’t just evaporate after I swallow it.
Trying to turn nouns and adjectives into verbs when they actually aren’t. I’m not Shakespeare, okay? I can’t just make up all the words I want to when I can’t think of any other way to construct a particular sentence. I’m not that awesome.
Being paranoid that my ideas aren’t actually original and I’m totally plagiarizing a random author’s masterpiece without even realizing it. ALL THE TIME.
Going back, reading something I wrote six months ago and not believing I’m actually the one who wrote it. I’m sort of afraid of my own brain. But that’s another story.