There’s music today. Check it out if you like violin and rock music.
One of the seed questions on goodreads started me thinking about writer’s block.
In general I’ve never had trouble thinking of things to write. Guiding my indulgences, yes, but not the thoughts themselves. In the past I was extremely shy about writing them down, and definitely about showing them to anyone. Putting them together in a structure was an alien endeavor, but that was everything to do with learning, rather than not having the juice for the raw material.
Depression stole a lot of it, for a long time. Primarily hope. It’s hard to motivate yourself when you think there’s no point to anything.
So there’s that. There’s the overwhelming feeling that there is no value to anything. It sounds like pure angst the likes of which you think you’ve left behind with high school. The voice of my depression is, in fact, often like the meanest, most brutally unrelenting bully, with a bully’s absolute confidence, and also their vested interest in seeing their words become reality.
Depending on how deep it is, sometimes I can write my way out, simply by writing about it. When I wrote poetry I think it contained some of the depression. It was a coping mechanism, since it was generally short, and required short bursts of intense concentration. Long fiction is a different beast, but it produces a similar result. If it’s deeper than that, there are other issues I have to worry about.
Then there’s boredom. I’ve been writing my characters for awhile now, and you can get bored of it, however temporarily. In those cases I change characters or do some throwaway story. One of those has become a prequel. Another is a different universe entirely, and one that I want to explore.
There are also the days when the brain refuses to fire. As long as it’s only once or twice, then I think it’s a matter of recharging. I watch YouTube.
Finally, there’s the “What happens? Why?” block. If something isn’t working, and I don’t know what it is, or something doesn’t have that nebulous “Hey, I like this!” quality, then it can be like fighting clouds. Walking, running, or the train are usually the answers for it. I feel like a good novel’s worth of writing has been done on Tokyo’s mass transit system. The invention of iPads is an amazing thing. Going out to run, if I can, or even walk, has kickstarted a lot of scenes that otherwise wouldn’t have been.
And now, some cicadas.
Rei Fletcher 