A writer friend asked me how I keep going and I write this as a reply to her but think it makes a good blog post touching on a few problems writers have:


I have the same problem of the wandering mind, so I take it in stabs. The modern computer with it's distractions is a problem but still I don't think that is a wholly negative thing, it is a feature of the creative imagination that has you writing in the first place.One of the things that brings me back to writing every day is a sense of guilt, or perhaps an engrained habit that frustrates me if I don't feed it. It think sometimes when people talk about writer's block it is not that they can't think of something to write - why should they? - it's that they have a habit they can't satisfy. Some writers are addicted to writing.
I also clutter myself up with ideas, start one thing and then get a hunger to work on something else. The best way to deal with that is to speed up your workload so that you can get projects out of the way. I am in this position because I did a huge amount of work for a book on India and it is just sitting waiting for me to finish this current one. But no book is ever harmed by being kept waiting. Trust that it will mature in the drawer, that your thinking will be better when you get back to the piece that you have deferred, because most of our work is done in the unconscious. This sometimes entails controlling the rush of enthusiasm. That will sometimes get a piece finished but usually it just gets it started. I used to wake up in the night and rush to write down an idea in case it was lost. Now I trust it to come back and prefer to get a good night's sleep.
I don't have a problem with dyslexia but the gene is in my family - if that is what it is. At least people don't see it as stupidity now, which is how they used to view it. On the laptop problem - nothing wrong with pen and paper. You are going to have to do successive drafts on an important piece so why not write the first draft by hand? I also used speak recognition software. Not sure why I gave it up. I wrote by pen, which seemed to me more natural because that is how I had learnt to write at school. The other bonus with speech recognition is that it would deal with your dyslexia. No spelling mistakes, just sometimes the wrong word, so you have to edit very carefully.

I know the history of writers is full of stories of angst and madness, but really you can enjoy being a writer, take pleasure in it and not let it be too much of a burden. Orwell coughing his guts up on Jura to write 1984 was a bit pathetic. It would have been just as good if he had done it in the comfort of a cottage in Sussex by an warm fire.