A writing habit

My main problem is that I don’t have a writing habit. I don’t get up at the crack of dawn to squeeze an hour in before work and I don’t type into the small hours when everyone around me sleeps. And actualy, I can’t even claim “everyone around me” as an excuse since I live alone.

In a vain attempt to find my habit, I enrolled on an OU course in creative writing (A215). Did it work? Well, yes and no. To be fair, I didn’t put the work in - I found that I resented having to spend time working on assignments such as short stories and poems when I had a novel in my head that I should have beeen working on. Of course, I would never have been working on the novel because it’s been in my head for two years now and never hit the page. So in that sense, I never really gave the course a chance.

But I did get the assignments done and have a small portfolio of short stories and poems to show for it - and I actually I found that it has loosened up my creative muscles. When I was at school (yes, I can just about remember that far back) I always had dozens of ideas for stories buzzing about in my head. Then I went to college and university and then work and the ideas dried up. Completing the OU course has brought some of those ideas back so it was worth it just for that.