Inactivity
Unsurprisingly, I haven't gotten half of what I'd hoped to accomplish done the past couple of weeks. I honestly don't know what's wrong with me. It's not even writer's block--I know what I'm doing and more or less how I want to do it--it's just total lack of motivation. Everyone who's read parts of it think the novel's fantastic, so it's not for lack of support. It's just...I honestly don't know what's going on with me lately. I'm going to quit all of my new RP sites again, just because they're being an emotional drain on me more than a creative outlet. I'm also going to convince my roommate and my beta-reader to kick me/throw things at me/nag me whenever they see me with freetime that I'm not using to write.
Had another harddrive scare the other night. I was writing up the CSG scene, and saved--and as soon as I hit the save button, the computer froze up. It wouldn't let me do anything in the window, so I couldn't save it to disk or copy it to paste it into an email. Since that's exactly what it did the last time my computer crashed (around this time of year, to boot) I was a little shaken up. Finally I managed to get into my second windows account and got all of my important files onto my zip drive before that account froze up too--thank god.
Restarted and Parnassus is working just fine again. I ended up losing about a page, so no big deal--but in the meantime I nearly had a heart attack. Still, that's no excuse for not going back and finishing the scene, which I haven't done and I'm ashamed of myself for it.
I want to get this damn thing finished.
I still haven't subscribed to the Writer's Digest website, and I haven't really done any editing either. I'm a big void of creativity lately, I guess.
There's a workshop here on campus on Wednesday about writing dialogue that I might attend. Dialogue is one of my stronger points, I'd like to think, but it could still be interesting to go and see what people have to say. Also, the idea of being surrounded by other like-minded individuals is tempting, as it's my experience that when you're in a room with creative people your own creativity tends to lift.
Unfortunately, not much writing will get done tonight because I have a midterm tomorrow which I need very desperately to study for. But tomorrow night is fair game, and if I don't get anything done I will kick myself.
I should start carrying my zip drive around for moments like this; I'm stranded on the opposite side of campus from my apartment, killing time before meeting up with some people for dinner and a study group. I have 45 minutes until they get here...and I could be writing now, except I don't have what I'd written before to look back on. Which I suppose is a shoddy excuse, as I could write a random scene from the middle of the book and email it to myself...but I've been making excuses all day.
Altogether, this is a day of frustration and annoyance, mostly at myself.
Hopefully I'll get out of this funk soon.
posted by Jaded Enlightenment | 4:00 PM
2 Comments:
Carry your zipdrive. Or purchase a little print notebook, and always carry that and a pen. I like those small spiral bound memo books for writing on the fly, and find that retyping what I jotted in them usually results in minor line edits just while I'm getting it into my computer. Sometimes I use my PDA for it, the process between Graffiti or longhand in a paper memo pad is about the same except that I never misplace my PDA for long. lol
Sometimes I mistake a rumination process for procrastination. The urge to write builds and builds but I can't manage to get going on it -- and then the dam bursts. There's a type of writer's block that's "false block" and is time without actually writing -- but includes a lot of daydreaming about writing, writing in my head, puzzling over plot points or good lines or descriptive techniques. I usually know it afterwards because when the dam bursts on one of those there's also often a leap of skill.
I'll do something easily that always seemed hard or impossible, and it'll just flow naturally. I started to think of that type of prewriting as something like computer programs that run in background. They may slow the foreground process some or a lot while running, but after Scandisk finishes, wham, the foreground runs better than before.
Fallow periods are part of any learning curve. I get the same thing drawing or painting and if I get away from it for a while, what comes out when I get back to it is better than before.
Sometimes it is real block though and a push of willpower slams through it. I usually do that by freewriting, a timed freewrite often generates something like a starting point. Or I go looking up prompts if I don't like any of the partial stories or ideas I have laying around. Prompts are good for me for short stories because I get novel sized ideas without them.
Anyway I hope this comment posts. It's been a long time since I used blogger. :)
Oh cool, I still have my Blogger account. I have not posted in it in a long time, lately it's mostly been in dA or http://www.hobgoblin.net or LJ.
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