When I saw this prompt for Writers Reveal, I thought EASY! I can always write. Writing is my form of release. When life gives me lemons, I write about anything. Perhaps even lemonade.
Then I tried to elaborate. And I hit a brick wall. Oh, sweet irony.
I didn’t know where to go from there. What do you do when the lemons you’re given take the form of writer’s block?
I flicked back through my blog posts for examples. And I realised that for every la-dee-dah, life is beautiful post I’ve written, there’s (at least) one other inspired by something less than impressive.
When life gives me mummy wars, I rewrite some song lyrics. When life gives me a crap Budget announcement, I… rewrite some song lyrics. (I also get more requests from financial services companies to write updates and newsletters, so that particular lemon certainly became lemonade for a short while.)
And when life gives me a bad day, I… well what do you know, I rewrite more song lyrics. I sense a theme here.
When life gives me a shoulder injury, I take a rare selfie and bemoan the things I can no longer do.
When life gives me judgey judgersons, I write ranty posts that open more writing doors than any airy fairy posts ever did.
It’s nice when life gives you sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, everything that’s wonderful… (Sorry. I promise not to write any more song lyrics in this post.)
But when life gives you lemons, there’s still plenty to write about. In fact, it gives you something to write about.
If nothing else, you could always write a recipe for lemonade.
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Each month, I receive a writing prompt as part of a link-up called Writers Reveal. This post was inspired by the prompt ‘When life gives you lemons… how do you keep on writing?’ from Melissa at Melissa Writes.
You can see what everyone else has done with the same prompt at:
Do you write? How do you keep writing when life is less than fun?
I read the title of my post and my brain sang out “TEQUILA!”
But otherwise I can’t really comment. I stopped writing when life stopped being fun. Safe to say, I’m a quitter!
And just quietly, it takes a lot of skill to rewrite song lyrics!
Now I have that very excellent song stuck in my head. I was at the bar with my drinking team…
Lemons, they have saved me from getting really sick, well that and my vitamins. Without us lemons would still be on the tree so we really can’t complain if we’re given lemons!
Love that outlook!
Please never give up writing song lyrics!! Oh and I was playing words of wonder on my phone and unco was totally a word!!
Thanks Ann! Unco is totally a word – I like to think that my uncoordination has played a very big part in making it so!
Love this post – you’re so right, often it’s the crap things in life that give us precious blog fodder!
Visiting today from #teamIBOT xxx
Thanks Janet. Have grumps, will blog!
When life gives me lemons I love to write about it. Often though I won’t publish these posts. I will keep them for myself. Just getting my feelings out is often enough.
That’s true – we don’t always have to hit ‘publish’.
I second Ann’s comment, please don’t ever stop rewriting song lyrics! My whole blog is based around when my life turned to shite so I guess I have turned my lemons into lemonade 🙂
Thanks Tegan – I will try to write lyrics forever and ever. Will be hard to top June’s, though. Such a great reaction.
I love lemons. Real and metaphorical. Cause whilst they aren’t totally pleasant, and generally make you pull a face, they are also good for a whole bunch of things.
Including song lyrics. 🙂
And lemon slice. Mmmmmm, lemon slice.
YEP! A classic example of this for me was last week. I was hit with some surprise news from a colleague that she had found another job and would be leaving…which shocked me because for some reason I thought I’d be first. Cue: emotional meltdown. After I calmed down, I wrote a blog post called Explosions which was better than therapy.
Tracking down this blog post! It’s funny what can be considered ‘lemons’ – sometimes it surprises you.
I don’t write song lyrics, but I do tend to write my woes away, in a sense. And I’m suffering from a shoulder injury too – “frozen shoulder” – I can’t move it much, it hurts and the doctors don’t know how to help it, but I get to see a specialist, so that’s a positive, right? 😉
Oh no! You poor thing. I hope writing is helping.
I picked my own lemons from someone elses tree recently and made a lemon cordial, now I know who stupidly easy it is to make, I am going to make it ALL the time.
Mmmmm, lemon cordial. YUM!
I love your song lyrics so maybe lemons are a good thing after all. I often find more inspiration in the lemons than the lemonade, but maybe I’m just bitter 🙂
Haha, I don’t think you’re bitter! Love it though. Bring on the lemonade for me.
We have so many lemons at the moment! I was hoping for a recipe. The struggle I’m having is that I don’t like eating sugar, and finding a recipe that doesn’t use sweetness to balance the tart is so impossible.
Sorry about the lack of recipe! That would be tricky.
Well said! Lemons can be tough to deal with, but at least we can turn them into lemonade through writing!
Thanks J.C.!
thanks for the great article, keep up the good work