Writing

I have been looking through the Reverb 10 prompts for December and I don't think I will use them all.  There are a couple I like, so I will post about the first one today and the second tomorrow.

The first one I like is from December 2nd: What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing -- and can you eliminate it?

This is a tough one for me because the answer is immediately obvious and it is something that I could give up, but really don't want to.  The answer is television.  Sadly I watch a lot of television.  I have been trying to cut down the number of shows I follow.  When a show ends I try not to add another one, but this has not been working out all that well.  For example, when Lost ended, I got hooked on Dexter shortly after.

Before I started my final year of grad school in the summer of 2009, I took a serious look at the shows I was following because I knew my last year was going to be very busy.  I dropped a number of shows that I felt I had low interest in.  I don't really miss them, so even though I have graduated from my Masters program, I have not started watching them again.

The struggle I face is that watching TV takes up a lot of time that I could be using more productively for many things, not just writing.  TV is also not essential to my life, so theoretically I could eliminate it completely, but I really really don't want to.  I enjoy following all these stories and I get wrapped up in them, even though they are not real.

What I need to do is simply be more aggressive about slimming down the list of shows I follow.  There is at least one that comes to mind, maybe two, that I could get ride of.  Maybe at the end of this season I will take them off my list.  I need to find something more productive to fill the void that television fills right now, but I have no idea what that could be.  I am not too optimistic that I will find anything.