Writing is not physically demanding, but try doing it every day for three or four hours. The first thing you have to accomplish is to put your body in the chair. (There are other saltier words for body.) Then you have to move your fingers, despite interference from your brain. One of my remedies for this laziness (which some glorify as “writer’s block”) is to read a prayer to St. Joseph each morning before I begin. It hangs over my writing desk.
The beautiful thing about the saints is, they are so connected to the practicalities of daily life. Lose something? Pray to St. Anthony. Have a particularly thorny problem? Think it’s hopeless? Call on St. Jude. Can’t write? Ring up St. Joseph the Worker, whose feast we celebrate today.
Many things link me to St. Joseph, beginning with my own father (long story). Two Catholic links are St. Teresa of Avila, who had a particular devotion to him; and Dorothy Day, who distributed the first edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper on May 1, 1933, just as the Communists were making their greatest inroads among a depressed working class in America. She intended to show workers that the Catholic Church has a program for them as well. Pope Pius XII followed suit by making this a feast day, beginning in 1955.
Here is the prayer to St. Joseph. I hope you find it as helpful as I do in getting over writer’s block or garden-variety laziness: