Writing...it's not easy all the time. Sometimes the words flow like water. Sometimes it's a huge, thundering flood of action and description, the poetry within the prose crashing down the mountainside like an avalanche, and WOE UNTO THOSE WHO FALL BENEATH, drowned in verbs and adjectives, smothered by emotion and violence.
But other times...damn. If it's not the constant lure of distraction, of checking inboxes and the socials, or watching in paralyzed terror as our world slides into the Reality TV abyss that it's becoming, it's just hard.
I'm not a believer in writer's block as a thing in itself, but I know we all get bogged down. For me, when it happens, it usually happens about a hundred and fifty pages into a new novel. Not a wall, or a block, but a time when it's difficult to make those daily writing goals. It doesn't last long, usually, but when it does, you've got to keep at it. Keep working. It'll click, eventually.
You can do all kinds of things...
You can can work on something else entirely, even if it's something as small as a blog entry (WHO? ME?), or something as large as the story after the current WIP.
You can work on what's coming next, even if you're one of those seat-of-the-pants folks (*looks around...yeah, that's me, too).
You can force it. You can sit there, and just fucking muscle through the hard parts. Any clunky crap that needs to get cut will get cut in the first...or second...or eleventy-fifth rewrite (*hears a ghostly echo of Little Richard at an awards show, saying, "It's STILL me!").
Either way, the name of the game is perseverance, just like it always is. You keep digging till it's all dug out. You keep writing until you reach the end. You keep editing until it's actually what you mean to say. You keep submitting until you fucking get published.
And then you do it again, because the more you do, the better you get.
Till next time...keep reading, keep writing, and keep taking care of each other.
But other times...damn. If it's not the constant lure of distraction, of checking inboxes and the socials, or watching in paralyzed terror as our world slides into the Reality TV abyss that it's becoming, it's just hard.
I'm not a believer in writer's block as a thing in itself, but I know we all get bogged down. For me, when it happens, it usually happens about a hundred and fifty pages into a new novel. Not a wall, or a block, but a time when it's difficult to make those daily writing goals. It doesn't last long, usually, but when it does, you've got to keep at it. Keep working. It'll click, eventually.
You can do all kinds of things...
You can can work on something else entirely, even if it's something as small as a blog entry (WHO? ME?), or something as large as the story after the current WIP.
You can work on what's coming next, even if you're one of those seat-of-the-pants folks (*looks around...yeah, that's me, too).
You can force it. You can sit there, and just fucking muscle through the hard parts. Any clunky crap that needs to get cut will get cut in the first...or second...or eleventy-fifth rewrite (*hears a ghostly echo of Little Richard at an awards show, saying, "It's STILL me!").
Either way, the name of the game is perseverance, just like it always is. You keep digging till it's all dug out. You keep writing until you reach the end. You keep editing until it's actually what you mean to say. You keep submitting until you fucking get published.
And then you do it again, because the more you do, the better you get.
Till next time...keep reading, keep writing, and keep taking care of each other.