Always with the words

It’s the last week of our July series! I have a really interesting theme picked out for next month, and I’m getting really excited to finalize what I’ll be talking about. One of these days, maybe I’ll do a blog to tell you guys how I blog… Digressing again, aren't I? 

Since this is the last week of our series on things writers do, I’ve picked out my two favorite topics. Well, technically three. Today, we’ll be talking about two things. Why? Because they went hand in hand, and it made more sense to take a day and talk about both than it did to take two days for smaller topics.

But enough descriptions while hiding the actual topic! Let’s get started.

If you’re a writer…

You know what it feels like to have your eyes spin from staring at words too long

And…

You know how to prevent the screen-staring headache, but you don’t always do it

Know what I mean?

I spend hours every day, sitting at my computer, writing or editing (and sometimes reading) until I seriously can’t look away without my eyes hurting. It happens a lot during the editing phase, actually, because I’ll spent about eight hours in any given day editing as much as I possibly can. When I’m writing, I usually take breaks here and there to do some other things, but when I edit, that’s just not the case.

As writers, we know what it’s like to continually stare at a screen.

And I’m sure you’d say that a lot of other professionals have that problem as well. Really, in this day and age, nearly everyone is on the computer all day. But you know what? Most of them aren’t extremely intensely staring at the screen, at words, waiting for magic to happen.

Most professionals are doing rote tasks on their computers all day. They’re working, yes, but they’re not actively focused on words all day. They’re looking at images as well, they’re looking at different websites and the graphics therein. Writers, however, are just sitting here looking at words—and you can only stare at words for so long before it gets old.

It happens when you’re reading all day, too. Pretty much, it just happens whenever you’ve been looking at words for too many hours in a day.

Unfortunately for writers, that’s our livelihood.

But, for many of us, we’ve gotten to the point where we know how to prevent the oncoming headache that ensues from staring at said words. We’ve been at it long enough that we know we should look away for fifteen minutes every hour, to take your eyes off the words for a little while whenever we can and give our eyes the break they need.

Then again, most of us never bother to do it.

Why? Because that would mean taking our eyes off the thing we do, the thing we love, and who wants to do that? Sheesh. No, we want to keep doing what we’re doing, we don’t want to stop writing, to stop reading and editing and bettering our craft.

So we continue to stare at the screens, at the words, and fight off the headaches threatening to bubble over the whole of our consciousness, and for that, you have a writer who’s written many books, and a writer who never stops writing.

Isn’t that what we are, in the end?

[love]

{Rani D}