Oh, To Be One of Those Dedicated Artists

Yesterday and today I finally did something I have been wanting to do every day for so long. I  got motivated, set my alarm for 5:00am, and got up and worked on my writing. (I am currently trying to publish picture books for children.)

This might not seem like a big deal, but it has always been so hard to give up that extra 1 ½ hours of sleep! My four-year-old keeps me going all the time, and many times I have set the alarm early only to have him wake up early, too (oh, the frustration!), or more often, to notice the darkness and the chilly air outside the blankets and turn the alarm off.

But I want to be a writer. And the only way to be a writer is to put butt in chair, as someone once said. I’ve always admired stories of dedicated artists who get up before daylight to work on their craft. I wanted to be one of them, but for some reason I just couldn’t do it.

Until yesterday. The night before, I wrote in my diary, and at the end of my entry I held my pen above the paper and tried to decide if I was truly going to write what I thought I might write. “I am getting up early to write tomorrow!” It’s funny how hard that was for me to write, but I knew that if I wrote it, I had to do it. It wasn’t a list of goals or something on my to-do list that might or might not get done. It was a statement as fact. So I had to do it.

And I didn’t keel over in exhaustion later in the day. Instead, I started the day with a feeling of accomplishment and a connection to my creative self. I drank my hot tea and held George on my lap, and I wrote while the world woke up around me.

I am going to do this every morning. I am.