My Facebook friends know all about my recent computer woes. They started when my computer started acting funny. Applications kept crashing. Restarting took several minutes, not seconds – an eternity by Mac standards. My keyboard sporadically stopped working.
At my wit’s end, I tried to wipe my hard drive and start afresh. (This was after Norton assured me that all was well on the Mac side of things.) My computer went into lockdown to protect its buggy self, and I hauled the machine to the nearest Apple store, where I described the problem.
Here’s where things went wrong.
I’m not the Genius here…
The very polite and helpful technician at Apple – one of their Geniuses – listened to me and cheerfully formatted my hard drive. Then, he reinstalled the latest version of Snow Leopard and sent me on my way with a clean slate.
Unfortunately, the problem was a hardware issue: my hard drive was in its death throes.
The technician helping me treated the immediate symptom: I couldn’t reinstall my operating system. He should have looked deeper to find out why my computer was acting screwy in the first place.
My takeaway
For the past month, I’ve struggled mightily with wrapping up this novel manuscript. I’m determined to finish this draft through before starting what I hope will be the final “working” draft. But I’m rebelling against the prospect of writing another 100,000 words of meandering garbage.
The symptom? I’m not writing. I feel like scribbling away in my notebook is an easy waste of time. Sure, I can churn out words, but I’m eating away precious time that could be spent writing stuff that might actually contribute to the final storyline.
I recognize this resistance and think, “Well, you just have to suck it up and forge ahead.” And it’s not working.
So, I finally took a step back, considered the underlying issue – my desire to not “waste time” – and decided I needed a road map.
Instead of freewriting the rest of this draft, as I have up until now, I’m going to plot out what has to happen to bring the current story to a conclusion. Then, I’ll get from Point A to Point B to Point C until I’m finished with the draft.
Had I dealt with this roadblock in the beginning, I wouldn’t have lost a month of writing by telling myself to gut it out and push through. Although I would still have had less writing time due to the computer issues…
What is your biggest roadblock to writing? How can you overcome it?
