Writing journal

January has ended and I've done very little writing. Not for lack of time, necessarily, even though work has been busy with the final deliverables. It's for lack of focus, I think, and another feeling I can't quite put my finger on.

Actually, scrap that. The feeling is clear and familiar: it's fear, plain and simple. Not the sort that makes you sweat and increases your heart rate, but rather the paralyzing kind. Where do I start? Where do I set the action? What world, what society are we talking about? I fancied myself a practical person with a problem-solving attitude, but the truth when it comes to starting my story, I would rather do anything else – with “scrolling through Tumblr” being my most infuriatingly time-consuming activity.

I know I'm lacking a clear idea or a fully developed plot, while I have themes I want to touch upon, and perhaps that's what's making this so hard to start.

New plan

I'm very lucky to be working for a company that wants to be “people-centric” and is actually trying to follow through with this intention. Today, during the weekly company-wide meeting, a new benefit has been announced. They have signed up for a yearly business subscription with Udemy – for those who don't know, it's one of those websites that offer a bunch of online courses – which means each one of us will be able to take any course at any time. Our line manager will make a training path for each one of us, that we can discuss and change, but we can also just pick any course we want, whether it be vegan cooking or origami. The purpose is to upskill but also to keep ourselves busy during this long lockdown that's happening here in Portugal, where the Covid cases have spiked so fast we have the higher number of cases and death per million in the world.

I've already started a creative writing course on Coursera and it seemed pretty cool, but I couldn't commit enough time to it. As soon as I get my login details, I'm going to pick a creative writing course on Udemy and see if I can manage to stick to it.

Hopefully, it will get my writing going within some clear boundaries and it will feel a little less scary.