The importance of momentum in writing

By April 10th, I had published 49 blog posts and written a few more into the publish buffer.

Then on April 11th I got sick and spent nearly two weeks mostly in bed, and didn’t have any energy to read, write or even really think about stuff. I had a few posts in the buffer to maintain a weekly publishing cadence that I’m aiming for.

I’m writing this on May 3rd and it’s been a couple of weeks since I started feeling better. I struggle to write. The momentum that I had built up during that last year or two and especially this spring disappeared in just two weeks.

I still have plenty of ideas, half-researched posts and desire to write but since I didn’t write daily as I normally do, I’m finding it very difficult to get back to writing. So I’m using the common trick in my writing toolkit: write about writing.

I tried to get back into writing by continuing on a couple of larger pieces I have already worked on but words didn’t seem to follow each other in a satisfying order. There was no flow, no sense of excitement or wonder in the sentences. So I’ll write a few bit more light-weight posts to get back into the flow until I get back to my bigger pieces.

Luckily, there’s a WeblogPoMo going on and while I’m skipping that in favor of writing daily in August during Blaugust, I’m reading a lot of other people’s posts and I have already picked up a few inspirations from them for future posts. If you’re a blogger, check out WeblogPoMo. While the official sign up has already passed, we’re only few days into May so it’s a good challenge to write more.