Creative Anxiety

I find myself here before 6AM teetering on the edge of creating something, but instead I thought I'd just compromise or start or get my feet wet with making this blog entry. Maybe I will find some literary momentum? I took a few breaths in the past hour that at the time convinced me that I need to be a novelist. I hadn't breathed air like that in years, probably since about my freshman year of college.

I'm a terrible writer, not in the sense that I write long, wandering sentences of uncertain certainty that weave intellect and insanity because all I'm really trying to do is capture exactly the way that my mind thinks for whomever stumbles upon this blog and pass it off as merely having read too much Faulkner recently, which isn't true at all--BUT I am a terrible writer because I often am so uncertain about how to go about writing in the terms of fundamentally sitting down in a good location--whatever a good location is--and creating something that wasn't there before. By the way, I think it's best for readers of this blog to read in the early hours of the morning after too little sleep or before getting only a couple of hours of sleep so the burning-eyed deprivation convinces us all that I'm a great, significant thinker, and whether or not I really am or not is beside the point.

When it comes to putting words down in whatever medium, I tighten up and don't know what to do and often do nothing at all. It's been this way most of my life. Something like:

Should I use this notebook or that one? pen or pencil? blue ink or black ink? Oh, look, here's a nice red pen. Should I just use my laptop and MSWord or should I use the desktop with the chair that has a broken wheel and is now pretty uncomfortable to sit in? I could write on my laptop right here in bed, but then I may fall asleep. Is falling back asleep all that bad?

And heaven forbid I actually answer all of those questions and sit down to write something, what do I write about? What do I have to say? Should I just throw caution to the wind and type type type until I am too tired to type anymore, rest, and then go back to review and revise my work? I've never been able to do that. I've always needed to perfect each sentence before moving on to the next. It is a painfully slow process, but should I ever complete a thought, I can imagine it will be quite rewarding, if not highly emotional.