Saturday, September 5, 2015

Writer's Block?

Early last week I had made a resolution to myself to write a thousand words a day.  I had been getting pretty lax in terms of writing activity and I had wanted to make some kind of commitment to get myself going again.  And for about six days, I did it!  I got a lot of writing done, and finished off two chapters of the thing I am working on now. 

And then I started trying to write the next chapter, and I just had nothing.  It wasn't that I wasn't feeling like writing.  Far from it!  In fact, I was sitting down every night, but one, for hours, and trying to figure out what to write next.  But nothing was coming.  I ended up spending all that time doing research to what I wanted to eventually write.  I suppose I could have knocked out some words on the two or so short stories I have in the mix, but I just didn't feel like it.  I had felt all this momentum building up in the days before on the main thing, and working on something else would have felt like putting that on the back burner.  Besides, those things had stalled too; shifting focus to those would have meant still banging my head against a wall, it would just be a different wall. 

I wonder, then, if this is writer's block, or at least a version of it.  It's not that I don't want to write, or that I am being lazy.  It is just that the ideas are not yet there for what I want to do, what feels right when I put it on the page.  It's like I have to wait for my subconscious to catch up to what I want to work on.  Its annoying, because honestly I would rather be typing.  When I do enough typing, I find that I actually like it, the sensation of your self melting away and becoming merely the flow of words and sentence structures building themselves invisibly inside the cavern of the mind as your hands glide intuitively over the keyboard.  I want to get back to that.  Why can't I? 

Hurry up, brain!