Creativity and Colds

I have been suffering over this last week with a cold. I don't think it was bad enough to be elevated to the lofty world of flu, let alone swine flu, but it has been bad enough for me to only want to lie down in a quiet room with the curtains drawn. All my plans for the start of the New Year have disappeared along with my concentration span. Reading more than a couple of pages at a time has been impossible, writing out of the question. Even writing this blog is a wobbly experience. There it is. I'm human. I get colds.

I'm human, not a machine. So why do I expect myself to be able to churn out X thousand words a day, regardless of what else is going on in my life? I'm a big fan of 'a little and often' and it's true that the more you write the more it becomes a habit, like brushing your teeth, but sometimes even writing a little is impossible. For every Stephen King, with his 2000 words a day, every day, there's a Jane Austen, who was miserable during the years she lived in Bath and stopped writing, only restarting when she moved to Chawton.

Creativity can be stimulated by stress and adverse conditions, but it can also dry up. As writers we have to learn to recognise when our personal creativity is lying fallow and not beat ourselves up because we're not writing. Writing is not a competative sport. If you finished that short story, then you finished it. No reader is going to care whether you took two days, two weeks or two years to write it. All that matters is that the work is good. Now, pass me the paracetemol...