What keeps me from writing?

My son just brought a puppy home. Okay but what kept me from writing even before the puppy? Well, I have a lot to do, I’m not feeling it, the muses have left my side. I have no shortage of ideas for stories. I'm fascinated with the great tea race to India because of the tall masted ships. I ponder the idea of Vikings coming to Newfoundland and have the first 10 pages drafted. I think the women's suffrage movement in Virginia is filled with daring. My lack of working at my laptop has nothing to do with no idea what to write. So why do I avoid what brings me joy and makes me feel a rush of living purposefully?

Today my writing group meets, so right on time yesterday I began contemplating excuses to ask for an extension. The puppy is a solid reason. I put it in the text as an option, hit send, and waited. Sure enough the first response came back with, “I’m fine either way.” I received the opening to postpone that I desired. But was not writing what I truly wanted?

What is it about writing that I avoid? I dreamed of becoming an author. My first novel took 12 years to write. Most of that time was spent convincing myself I could and would actually write a book. The possibility existed that I wasn’t good enough for my dream. It sounds more significant to say I’m writing a book than to believe my story needed me. I just needed to show up, to believe I had the ability to bring the story to life, yet a decade worth of excuses got in the way. If I truly believe something, then I act without thinking. I don’t inspect a chair before sitting. I believe the chair will hold me and I act accordingly. So why can’t I believe in my writing? With three novels under my belt, I’m still making excuses to my writing group and myself.

I’m not sure I’ve pondered the extent of my problem, but when I consider my excuses, they stem from distractions and no time. Kronos, the father of the Titans, devoured his children. Kronos, as time deified, was eating away through life’s limits of death. In this modern setting, time not only devours us, it is filled with so much noise we can’t remember what’s important to us let alone begin to imagine our dreams as a reality. With each day filled with the noise of burgeoning calendars and text messages of "I'm running a little late," our dreams die, sacrificed to time’s insidious intent to distract us from what we deeply desire.

A story sitting inside is a little song. If I am going to write, I must carve out time to quiet my mind and schedule long enough to hear the melody. The characters exist inside my being waiting, longing to walk among the living. That is an honorable and noble act - to sacrifice a corner of my time to breathe in quiet and exhale through the written word. This is precisely why my writing group is meeting tonight at my house to accommodate the puppy. I don’t have anything new to share yet, but I’ve made a promise to get one page written, just one. That will be enough until the next time our writers group shows up on my calendar and the excuses begin again.