Brain Fertilizer

Geez, it's getting so it's harder to think up a new title for my writing progress reports than it is to write!

I didn't write anything yesterday. I tried, but I guess I had some "writer's block". Actually, that's crap; I don't really believe in writer's block and here's why: Last night, I was tired and just wasn't in the mood. I knew I was having difficulty developing a transition, and didn't feel like working on it. So I thought about it for 24 hours, but didn't really come up with a better solution.

Tonight, even though I felt just as uninspired, I had more energy, so I just started writing. I was partway through the first sub-standard (and if you knew just how low my standards are, you'd be shocked with how bad it was) paragraph when I thought of a better way to handle the transition. From there, the action proceeded fairly naturally to the next step. I cranked out about 1100 words in about 35 minutes, nearly without effort. I stopped because I don't want to burn out by writing too much. We'll see tomorrow if that was a bad move or not [grin].

So the best way to get through writer's block is writing, even if it's a listing of everything within visual range of your writing location. It doesn't matter. The actual act of seeing words appear on paper will "prime the pump", so to speak, and the words will flow.

Well...at least, that's how it is for me. In any case, I may throw out every single one of the words I wrote tonight. I might end up throwing out just about everything I've written to date (over 11,000 words now). But the very act of writing something is better than thinking about plot and character, because writing is acting, it's deciding, it's evaluating and discarding and trying things on for size. Sometimes you really can't tell how the furniture might look in the room until you actually try to fit it all in; writing is the same way. No matter what form the final version of the novel takes, the writing I did tonight was a vital part of the process.

To point out the accomplishment from another angle, that's about 2500 words over the last 4 days. I will ensure I do at least 500 tonight again...although I'm going to shoot for 1500.

...on the other hand, we'll be picking up the new cat this afternoon. Hmmm.