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My friend C checked this out at the library, read it, loved it so much she bought it, and lent it to me. She said she thought of me the whole time she read it.

As soon as I started reading it, I said, Oh. This is why she wants me to read this. It’s perfect.

The subtitle is “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles.” But that’s even a little too abstract, too nice. I prefer the starkness of the title, because here’s the premise:

It’s a war.

If you’re not doing what you were born to do, creating what you were born to create, you’re losing.

But it’s OK. Because you’ll stop losing once you realize that the very resistance you are collapsing under is a sign that you’re on the right track. You just need to push through it instead of giving up.

You’ve already gotten the punch line of this blog entry, haven’t you? The punch line is why this blog entry even exists right now for you to be reading it. Yes, it’s because I finished the book and realized the only thing to do was to start writing. I was tempted to reread all the best parts, because it was so good. I was tempted to start a triumphant load of laundry. I was tempted to write an e-mail to C and tell her why I was glad she lent me the book. But I realized those were all resistance, too. What I really need to do is write the damn blog.

I have a lot of reasons not to blog. I don’t have time. I have serious concerns about what is and isn’t OK to write, first in a blog, second in a blog whose domain name makes it clear exactly who is writing. I haven’t written in a long time, therefore I will look ridiculous doing it now. People will wonder, “Is this for real this time or will she fade out like the other times and the other blogs she started?” My list of reasons goes on and on, in endless permutations and well-thought-out detail.

All of that is actually crap. I want to write. A lot. Preferably about myself. I have always wanted to write. Laura Ingalls Wilder was my great inspiration. The woman wrote plainly about the most mundane details of her life and it was all utterly fascinating because it was so clear and so different from our time and yet she was so human. I’ve dreamed my whole life of writing, not the Great American Novel, but the Great American Autobiography.

So here I am, showing up. I plan to continue to show up. It’s a guarantee that the works of Shakespeare will not appear here. (Actually, that would be plagiarism, so that’s a good thing.) But it actually doesn’t matter. I’m suddenly at the point where I would rather sling crap onto a Web page every day than live hobbled by my 10 million somewhat rational fears.

Oh, and by the way, read the book. I plan to buy it now, too. Like Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s simultaneously mundane and obvious and clear and piercing and true. I’d like to think you can’t escape reading the book without starting that thing you’ve been putting off that you know you really want to do. At the very least, I didn’t, and I plan to keep starting.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.