Either the well is too empty or too full. There's either writer's block, that infuriating syndrome in which you look at white paper and stare into blank space for what seems to be hours on end, or information overload. The latter was the case last night, when I wanted to blog, make Twitter contacts, work on my book, work on my coffee table book and simply find a way to strike gold, both literary gold (i.e., a spellbinding new chapter) and any subsequent literal gold, aka, bread, cash, duckets, ben franklins. (Think Lucy in Charlie Brown's Christmas...nickels, nickels, nickels, oh how I love the sound of cold hard cash).
So I decided to work on Indigo Sun, the big piece of autobiographical fiction that I have been wracking my brain over for almost a year. After five minutes of reorganizing some of the chapters I noticed that I am only at 22,000 words on that book. My dreams seemed to shatter before my eyes: the publisher I was hoping to snag requires manuscripts to be at least 75,000 words! I'm not even halfway there. I felt like a pawn in CandyLand. You're moving along the colored squares just fine, you're almost at the board's zenith where the queen stands with her sparkling wand and then you draw The Plum (sing: dun-dun-duuuun) from the stack of cards. To refresh your memory, The Plum's orchard is at the very beginning of the CandyLand board.
Overwhelmed at the thought of penning 50,000 more words to a novel (or shall I say novella?) that is (was) almost completed in my mind, I just abandoned everything for the evening: the blog, the books, the optimism, the dreams. I had literally made myself sick, just as sbass and I had discussed earlier that day. We take on so much, we get so excited and then we're wallowing in nausea.
I downed a shot of Pepto, went to bed and here I am, back in the saddle, trekking through the Plum's orchard.
image courtesy of
http://www.lucubrations.net/2007/08/kicked-out-of-candyland-mysterious.html
I can definitely relate to that feeling. There are so many things one would like to do, and starting is easy, but motivation seems to die down rather quickly, and then attention wanders in another direction, and you start yet another thing. As I see it, I tend to start new things, as an unconscious way of procrastinating on other things I´ve given up on before. As it's been explained to me, one has to be conscious about one´s creative rythm and be intentional about the stimulus we take in, the time we set aside for our craft, and the way we practice it in order to be prepared when creativity strikes. I don´t know if I'm making sense. I just wish you don´t give up on Inkwell Alley, because I really think you've got something going on here. As for your novel/novella, join NaNoWriMo. You have to hit 50,000 words from November 1st to the 30th or die. I did (probably running away from animation :P), and my word count is zip. We´ll see what happens.
ReplyDeleteWhat I want to say is that this really happens to everyone. Everyone gets the writer's block in one way or another. That's easy. I mean everyone. A few overcome that and live forever. How are you going escape being like everyone?
Love your blog! Thanks for following me on Twitter. Nice to be in the company of people that can "Think"!! Love the,"It's not who you are...it's who you can become". My point exactly!!!
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