First, I don’t believe in a muse. I believe you write or you don’t write. If you feel you need to be in a mood to write, then conjure up the mood. Candles, music, coffee, bourbon, whatever. Make it happen instead of waiting for it to happen.

There are some days where you sit down and you’ve got nothing. You feel like words have bottled up someplace you cannot see, and to write would only create a mess.

There are some days you don’t bother to sit. You don’t even want to face the screen, much less type. It doesn’t feel like fun. It doesn’t feel motivational. It doesn’t seem worth the effort. So you find something else to do.

You are at a crossroad. It is at this moment that you define whether you really want to write.

Writing is not easy. It’s not supposed to be. Good writing is agonizing, over time, during the times you least want to touch it.

Writing is not this exercise that makes you feel alive, scrumptious, and smart. While there are moments like these, they are not the average moments. Most of the time, you ponder, delete, rewrite, curse, and stack words that you hope make sense or fit together well.

Writing is not magical in the doing. The magic comes in the reading. The writer isn’t a magician until the words spark inside a reader’s head.

Between the doing and the reading is a lot of sweating over the right words. No, it isn’t easy. If you think it is, you might need to take another look.

So when you hate writing, when you want to clean toilets or mow the yard versus planting your butt in a chair, consider making yourself sit and write anyway. It’s facing up to the difficulty that makes each and every time you write more natural. Not easy, mind you, but more of a habit. Then one day you’ll realize you feel empty if you haven’t written your words before you put yourself to bed.