The Answer is...

In accordance with my New Year's Resolution to write every day in 2013, I've found myself writing even when I didn't really want to. If I've been at my laptop, it's easier to force myself to do some work (except for  tonight, for some reason, when work just seems disgusting, so I'm writing this instead...) However, it's happening more and more often that I don't even switch my laptop on, sometimes for three or four days in a row.

The biggest problem with that is that I do most of my writing on my laptop. While I can use my tablet and keyboard anywhere, and have written blog posts in bed using them, I find it much more annoying than if I'm sitting at my laptop. I also can't write flash fiction while using my tablet, because I can't accurately judge how many words the story has. I don't like writing fragments of pieces on my tablet, so I can't write a novel/novella, and I can't concentrate when I'm in bed on writing an article or a chapter of a non-fiction book.

So what do I write?

My Twitter followers and my Writers' Soc friends might already know that the answer is...poetry. Which really surprised me.

I have never really considered myself much of a natural poet. I once tried writing a poem every day, and the end results were too awful to share with the outside world. However, more recently I've found that I can more easily express myself in poetry, and I tend to enjoy it more than I used to. I've written, if I counted correctly, 21 poems this year.

Okay, it doesn't seem like a lot when you add it all up, but considering the fact that's probably more than I wrote all of last year I'm pretty proud of myself. It's become a more comfortable experience, even though I'm usually lying uncomfortably in bed while I write in an A4 pad. I've written poetry about friendship and alcohol and relationships and Dublin. I've explored the weirder side of my mind, the feelings I've been hiding from myself, and the notion of death as someone I might have known from school passed away.

Overall, it's been a weird but fulfilling experience, and it has led me to the conclusion that anyone can make an attempt at writing poetry, and if they're honest with themselves they might actually produce something worth reading or listening to. The feedback I've received on some of my poems has been positive (I can't say anything about the poems people haven't heard or read or given feedback on, so... yeah...), and I didn't really consider myself much of a poet to begin with. Occasional poetry was the most I ever had to my name.

Now I'm a bed-time poet. If I haven't written anything on a given day, I pick up the notepad and pen and just start writing, not trying to come up with something clever half the time, just letting the words come out as naturally as possible.

If you're in a situation like I am, where you want to write as much as possible but find yourself without the time to write anything, there's an answer available to you. The answer is poetry.