One of the things I love about working in the Fedora Project is the opportunity to blog.  In the beginning I thought blogging was for other people.  Then I realized I needed a place to talk about the things I was working on.  Then it became more than that.

There is something to this “writing thing” that resonates with me and makes me want to become a better writer.  Along the way I’ve read a few different books about writing.  Currently I’m reading Writing Down the Bones by Nataile Goldberg.  Like most of the good books I’ve found on creativity and writing, they were recommended by Merlin Mann (see the reading list at the bottom).

Recently, Goldberg was talking about resistance and all the excuses we can come up with for not writing.  Her suggestion was to spend a little bit of time writing those things down before getting on with your writing.  Another good book about resistance is The War of Art.

I resist writing because I tell myself that nobody will read what I write because there is such an ocean of other stuff out there written by other people–why would anybody read what I have to say?  Or I tell myself that the blog posts I have in process or would like to write about are too complicated and will take too long to complete.  And by the time they are completed Fedora will have moved on and those thoughts won’t be relevant any more.

Sometimes it isn’t so much about resistance as it is the thoughts and ruminations about other things going on at work or at home.  A million questions fly in and out of my head as I try to “just write.” My conclusion is that sometimes you just have to come back to it.  It cannot be forced.  Other times brute force is just what is needed.

How do you know when you genuinely need a break or when you are just trying to talk your way out of having to do what you should be doing?