Memes are one of my favorite aspects of the internet. They give me a good laugh and let me know other people who have similar feelings about pop culture besides myself. In short, memes help me not takes things more seriously than it was meant to be thought about. However, memes aren’t all chuckles and clever jokes. I think some trivialize subjects that are very serious. For me, memes almost killed my creativity by normalizing writers’ block.
When I made my Pinterest account, I was an aspiring writer. Actually, with no publishing deals coming up in the near future, I am still an aspiring writer, but back then I wasn't as disciplined. I was in high school and felt alone in my novel dreams. The vast majority of my classmates weren’t reading much less writing their own books so I turned to the internet community. It helped me realize I wasn’t alone and there was a lot of other people like me. Could I say it was relatable...?
What I particularly enjoyed was the memes about how hard it was to write. However, I didn’t think it isn’t always done right. (See what I did there?) There is nothing wrong with admitting that it is easier to plan out a scene than actually writing it. There is nothing wrong with admitting that editing is a lot less fun than churning out a draft. However, I do not believe it is okay to act like writers’ block is a perfectly justified excuse for not writing. I’m not saying writers’ block doesn’t happen. Anyone who had to hand in any sort of paper in for school will tell you it’s real, but it doesn’t make it oaky to be unproductive in every way shape and form.
It wasn’t until I started college when I realized a sloth could write faster than me, and I came to understand there was a difference between having a bad day heck a bad week where you don’t get much writing done to having a bad year, which is what happened to me quite often. What hurt me the most when I wasn’t writing was my skills not improving. The only practice I was getting was when I was writing for school, and those APA formatted-research papers aren’t the style I want to write my fiction in. I didn’t want those relatable memes to be so close to the truth anymore.
What did I do? I participated in NaNoWriMo in January because I missed it in November. I didn’t reach my goal, but I still wrote almost every day and it felt good. About a month after my self-imposed challenged I decided to start a blog to help myself improve at writing with deadlines. My non-fiction still takes me longer to finish than I would like, but it is because I’m writing very slowly not because I’m not writing at all. I don’t update my blog as often as I’d like to, but I managed to never let a month go by without completing at least one post.
I still have bad days, bad weeks, and sometimes bad months. I have a part time job and go to school full time, and I have a social life on top of that. I am not at the point where I can write full time. However, I can say I don’t go for over a year without touching my keyboard or notebook and telling myself it’s perfectly normal. My creative writing professor told me I cannot finish a novel draft by writing four pages and then stuffing it into a drawer.
I’ve had people in my personal life warn me that it will take years to finish my novel. It will take years for me to get my college degree and nobody warned me not to do that. I was told I couldn’t keep up with a blog and that it would die in a few months. I have been blogging consistently for an entire year now. For every person who thought I was crazy I had a person who supported me which will always be better than relatable memes.
