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Surviving The Gauntlet
Most times it’s not how fast you run.
As a writer (yeah, I call myself that these days) my creative process has started to adopt a strange pattern of ebbs and flows. There are days I’m on fire. Story ideas fill my brain to overflowing. I furiously capture them in a notebook for fear of forgetting them. Recently, I’ve had days when I crank out two, three, sometimes four pieces a day. Times when I’ve hammered out six to seven thousand words inside an eight hour period.
Times when “prolific” is my middle name.
Then all of a sudden, I’m staring at a blank page and the only thing tickling my synapses is the sound of crickets.
These are the times I’m traveling through the gauntlet.
The mental, self-flagellation I put myself through when I struggle with my writing is just as torturous as walking a physical gauntlet.
In olden days the Royal Navy had a rather nasty form of corporal punishment known as walking the gauntlet. An offender of a minor offense was stripped at the waist and forced to walk along a channel formed by his fellow sailors as they whipped the man with knittles — long cords of leather and rope knotted at the end.
