My Essential Question is how does an out of practice writer become an active, disciplined writer?

I think that my essential question should change to something regarding how negative circumstances effect writing, or my writing in particular and my writing process. Like how I only think about weird/sad stories now. Happy prompts do not flow easy when I’m thinking of ideas now. I could also talk about how focusing on one task has gotten extremely difficult due to all of the news stories and updates that are constantly flooding my feed and my life. All of these updates and news stories are crowding my brain, giving me very little room to do the things I need to do. Since I have previously talked about not only needed a physical space that I need to go to write, but also a mental space, worry and anxiety have flooded all my recreational mind rooms. There is no more space for me to quietly, peacefully, and calmly write in my mind unperturbed.

Along with this challenge, reading has also become cumbersome. I find that my mind never gives me peace when I want to read. My worries are always screaming out at me and I can’t focus on a single line or word on a page. At times I am able to get through parts of my book, but I no longer can sit down for three or four hours and read. Reading used to be my pastime during breaks. I would finish maybe five or six books when I went on vacations, but now I can struggle through a chapter at most. And reading for one hour is a lot, maybe sometimes I can push myself for two hours, but usually at that point I was not paying attention to the plot or the characters and instead was focusing on keeping my eyes moving across the line.

I think I might want to change my Essential Question because under normal circumstances my current Essential Question would be answered very differently than how I’m answering it now. First of all I would be going outside and drawing inspiration from very different sources and experiences. My complete mindset would be very different, I would be able to see people in person and be in a better mindset to write. This would also improve my focus and my schedule. If things were “normal” right now I wouldn’t be so caught up worried about one massive thing. All my attention and energy wouldn’t be geared towards making sure that I’m keeping in touch with relatives and friends just in case something happens to them. Everything is very different now, obviously, and therefore my Essential Question should also be different.

Our prompt:

What have you learned that begins to answer your essential question? What further questions do you have?

Has your essential question changed? If so, how? What do you want to know more about?

How are you exploring your essential question? Is it different from what you expected?

If you feel you are not answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected?

Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

This is a different prompt than some cohorts are doing for CR#4 (they did this one last week), so please put a prompt into the final version for the blog so it’s clear what you are reflecting on.