Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Happy Happy Joy Joy


It's not going to take much for me to be happy about my writing nowadays.  Just the simple fact that I wrote today is cause enough for a celebration (and a blog post!).  Sure, it's only another three pages so far, but it's THREE PAGES I didn't have a week or a month ago for that matter.

By finally finishing that scene, and that chapter, I'm now inspired to continue with the next chapter and scene, and I'm excited to see where it's going to go - because I have no idea.  This is the fun part of writing without an outline or a plan - it can be a wild ride when the characters surprise you.

So bring it characters! Let's go for a ride!

The Relationship



It’s after 1:00 a.m., and that after-dinner nap that seemed like such a neat idea at the time, is coming back to haunt me. One of these days my sleep will be normal. But then again, my sleep has never been “normal”, and so it goes…

The quiet of my mind about my writing is finally growing restless again, and I can’t tell if it’s out of a true need to write, or out of disgust of not writing recently. I’ve decided I don’t care how or why it’s coming, only that it does what it’s supposed to do – get me to write.

Writing is definitely like a relationship. Initially I fell in love with the idea, couldn’t go a day without doing something with it, thought about it ALL the time, etc., and then real life happened. I started thinking about it less and less, got busy with other things – most of them not that important, really. It then became a love/hate thing, where I dreaded the idea of writing because I just wasn’t “into” it at the time. Then my mind changed on major issues of the book, and I edited the crap out of it. Fickle, aren’t I?

I get that the honeymoon of the novel is over, and it’s time to do the day to day WORK of it. That saddens me some. I want to feel that rush again. The electricity of my fingers flying on the keyboard trying to get it all out of my head and onto the page. Living inside my character’s heads. Visualizing scenes. I want that all back.

I think I can get part of that back at least - if I do the WORK. Like any relationship, you need to do the day to day minutiae, even when you don’t feel like it. It’s life. Suck it up and just do it, right? Right.

I thought about setting little goals for myself – maybe just rewriting that one section that I’ve been telling myself for weeks to do. Or - write so many new pages a day, whether it’s crap or not. But I’m not even going to restrict myself that way. At this point, I think any limitations will only make it harder for me to get started in the first place. I need to start courting my book again, taking it out on dates so to speak, and see where we go from there…