freewriting

I have a con­fes­sion to make. I’ve nev­er been much of a jour­naler, my cre­ativ­i­ty has always been bursty, and I have nev­er in my life had any­thing resem­bling a dai­ly writ­ing habit.
But I real­ly need one.
“Need” is the right word, too. I almost wrote “should,” but that isn’t quite cor­rect. It’s 1:30 p.m., and I’ve accom­plished next to noth­ing so far today. I’ve been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing, surf­ing, orga­niz­ing, clean­ing… but not one thing that actu­al­ly gets me clos­er to my goals. I have a whole bunch of things I “should” be doing, revi­sions and research. That’s not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is more that I’m in a sort of funk, and none of those “should” tasks appeal to me right now. This slump I’m in, I think is because I’ve lost con­tact with my cre­ative self. I’ve let the inner edi­tor have too much to do, too much to say late­ly. Yes, I’ve need­ed it for the revi­sions I’ve been work­ing on, but it got too much prac­tice, while my cre­ative side withered.
I haven’t writ­ten any­thing brand new, aside from a few blog posts here, for almost six months. Blog posts are good, I guess. I get to cre­ate, write, practice–and it serves a use­ful pur­pose, too (I hope!). A nice win-win.
But, writ­ing some­thing for pub­lic con­sump­tion is not the same as freewrit­ing, prac­tice, PLAY. I’ve been read­ing HOW TO BE A WRITER by Bar­bara Baig  and the first thing she address­es is this need to free our­selves from expec­ta­tion and play with writ­ing, with­out fear of any­one else see­ing the results. I’ve been see­ing this advice show up in var­i­ous snip­pets here and there from var­i­ous wise peo­ple for the past few weeks. The uni­verse is send­ing me sig­nals, but I’ve been try­ing hard to over­look them to focus instead on the “should“s, the con­crete to-do list, the goal-ori­ent­ed approach to achiev­ing my dreams.
I’m a log­i­cal per­son. I write non­fic­tion. I make lists. I set goals, and break them down, and work towards them. This is all good and use­ful… to a point.
But some­times, the well runs dry. I need to rest. I need to read. I NEED to cre­ate. That, after all, is the end goal. So, it’s time to lis­ten to the universe.
You, dear revi­sions, will just have to wait. I’m cur­rent­ly busy with much less impor­tant things.