When Inspiration Is Chasing You, Get Caught!

 

I have a deadline for 2 travel posts. I have a more pressing deadline for a writing contest whose early bird deadline I ignored because I wanted the manuscript to be flawless (not that “flawless” really exists for a writer or an editor.) Of course there is the novel I have been trying to finish for months (which was originally intended to finish in line with Writer’s Digest’s 90 Days to Your Novel), and two contests that I found about much too late, but I’m dying to enter (or at least brainstorm a good idea for later use) anyway.

And guess what I’m inspired to write instead? Blog posts for my own blogs. Yes, I love my blogs and writing for them. It is always great to present good new content to your audience, and it definitely helps your blogs’ ranking and traffic if you publish new and interesting content more often. But whenever I make a schedule for my blog posts, I am inspired to write anything but.

When I want to concentrate on my novel, I find myself writing blog posts or working on a story that was written before but will be reformatted.

So I decided to run with the flow.

But if you have to write one thing before the other, and that pressure (of the deadlines) is making you not write at all, it is better to write what you are inspired to than write nothing at all.

I’m a big fan of chasing inspiration, but sometimes inspiration has other ideas, and it wants to reach you for different ideas and stories than the one you need to work on. Don’t let it go. Write it down, and even if you don’t have the time to write all of it, write the most crucial part so that you can make it work when you come back to it.

If you ignore inspiration because you are waiting for another kind, there is a chance it will ignore you for a longer time-even when you are trying to chase it.

So I’m off to writing that TV series post now. What do you feel like writing at this very moment?