After a four-month hiatus, I recently began to start publishing my newsletter for writers again. I’d justified the lapse by saying to myself and anyone who would listen that I’m just too busy during the summer months to keep the e-zine alive. After all, there’s my day job, my partner’s seasonal business that I help out with on weekends, bills to pay, errands to run...I surely had no lack of excuses.

Then it occurred to me—and you may identify with this—that the same thing happens to my freelance writing career from time to time. Like many writers, I sometimes get stalled; each time this occurs, I initially tend to blame external circumstances for my lack of productivity. Not enough time. Too many other things going on. I can’t write until I organize my notes, my desk, my home office, my entire life--!

As I began to compare my procrastination surrounding WriteSuccess with those times I am not writing, I realized that there are primarily two underlying causes for both:

Boredom. I sometimes become bored with the type of writing I’ve been doing; the writing begins to seem too much like work, too much of a struggle, and I would start to put it off. The same thing definitely happened with my work on WriteSuccess. I had published it biweekly for the better part of eight years, give or take a couple of breaks. It began to feel stale to me, and I was afraid that would translate into equally stale reading for my subscribers.

Whenever it dawns on me that boredom is the issue, I know it’s time to try new markets, or maybe just write for fun for a while, as I’d done as a child. Or perhaps it means that I need to stretch my writing muscles and experiment with different writing avenues, like writing the lyrics to a country and western song, developing greeting card sentiments, or going back to my very first writing love, fiction. Likewise, in order to recommit to WriteSuccess, I needed to breathe new life into it. Reformat it. Try some new things. The needs of writers on the Internet have changed since the year 2000, when I published my first issue. WriteSuccess and I needed to change, too.

Fear. Fear has turned out to be another major reason for some of my writing lapses—fear of rejection, fear of wasting my time on something that no one would read or buy, fear of biting off more than I could chew, fear that maybe I’m not experienced enough to launch a copy writing business—I could go on, but this list is scaring me already!

Again, I was able to draw a parallel with why I’d been postponing the revival of WriteSuccess. I wanted to switch to an HTML format and make other changes as well. What if I had trouble working with the new design, and it came out looking wretched? What if I lost a ton of subscribers when I introduced the changes? These fear-based questions had me putting off this newsletter’s release date for weeks.

Fear is the more difficult block to admit to, and the tougher one to tackle. Indeed, it’s like getting back in the saddle after you’ve been thrown by a horse. You begin to think, maybe it’s time to find a new passion. Maybe it would be easier to...well, do just about anything rather than write again. After all, we certainly have enough things to distract us and devour our time. Who needs the added stress of worrying about whether or not one is writing?

But once I realize that it’s fear holding me back, I know what to do. What works for me is to take small steps. A sentence here, a paragraph there. With each step, the confidence grows and the fear dissipates. It works every single time.

So if you haven’t written for a while, or find yourself procrastinating in any step of the writing process (editing your work, querying an idea, looking for an agent, etc.) take some time to find out the real reason why. It could be boredom, it could be fear, it could be something else altogether. But trust me, it’s not the messy closet you’ve been telling yourself you need to clean first.

Your writing horse awaits. Time to get back on it.