In the superhero role playing game champions on of the disadvantages you can added to a character’s power to lower its point cost is an activation roll. Basically, when the character attempts to use their power, flight, energy blasty, whatever it is, the player must roll dice and if they make the target roll then the power function otherwise nothing happens.

For me writing can often feel like a power with an activation roll.

I have my stories, my characters, my themes and setting but getting started on that day’s writing can be a challenge. The internet with its endless diversions is a powerful temptation, as are movies, video games, and just plain old-fashioned daydreaming.

However, once I have begun to actually write, burying myself in the exact act of placing words into sentences, bringing the characters and events to life as I type them all resistance evaporates and it is terribly easy to fall into ‘flow’ and just write.

I am certain that there are many writers who feel the same way I do. It’s the basis of my statement ‘The hardest part of writing of butt to chair and fingers to keyboard.’

What exactly is the source of this resistance I am not sure. I don’t think it is a fear of failure. I have failed so many times that is holds little terror for me. Much like rejections its failure is simply another aspect of the writing experience that is nearly inescapable. There are numerous abandoned short stories, scripts, and novel in my history. It is not heart wrenching when a story crashes on take and never achieves flight, it is just part of the process. (Though I am happy to say that unfinished stories happen with far less frequency than they used to.)

I think it is simply the desire to not work.

Writing is work.

For me it is an emotional experience. I feel that same things my characters feel. Fear, elation, arousal, these are mirrored in me as I attempt to put them into prose. That is a tiring and strenuous process and it probably the common desire to avoid strain that levels this activation cost, a toll I again and again must find a method to pay.