500 words/day update

The wagon

My friends,

It has not been easy to be on the 500 words/day wagon. I have fallen off multiple times, and it’s been barely a week.

When you don’t have much confidence in your writing left, and haven’t been writing consistently in a long time, it’s really hard to stay on the wagon. The stacks of hay are wet and smell like sweaty shoes. The barrels of who-knows-what slosh loudly and bang against each other. You feel sweaty and like if only you were in a grove of cooling, shady trees, you could write, but instead you’re in this wagon. And there’s other people around you, sucking on pens, dipping quills in gorgeous navy-blue ink, armed with Mead notebooks and moleskins, writing.

Then there’s you, sitting in the corner, notebook and pen in hand…staring at a blank page.

NOTE: The featured image for this post appeared in 2015 on lalachinoise.wordpress.com originally, on a post about writer’s block (there are no coincidences!): link here

Frustration!

What to do? How to get the gears going again? They say free-write, write anything. But then I just write about how difficult writing is now, or how I don’t want to, or how I do but it’s so difficult, ugh! I want to write a story. I want to write fiction. Or at least poetry. C’mon, brain!

So you sit, staring at the blank page. And staring. And staring.

Then you realize, wow. I’m writing a blog post. That’s progress! And the other day, you wrote some ideas for the book you’ve been stuck in revision on. And put out of your mind all those other writers; they’re not you. They don’t know your experiences. They’re not writing your story. Your story, which you know is good, and you listed out all the best scenes to not cut; now you just have to link them all together.

So, any ideas, my friends? How do I link these good scenes together, and revise this darn book?

Ideas…or not? Help!

Or should I work on something new? A couple ideas have come to me, characters from my college thesis, and I think I might just want to write a short story or two, and not think about novels and outlines; so much planning involved, so much research. And since I always put magic in stories, maybe it would be fun to write a story with no magic in it. I could focus on the characters’ emotions and the events, and not have to think out rules of magic, etc. Maybe I should let my tired old brain just get chugging very…very…slowly.

I hope to come out with a fiction update on this blog soon. Keep your eyes peeled.

Also, is anyone into the Artist’s Way? I feel like if I had a group reading and doing the activities with me, it would help me lot, but I can’t seem to finish the whole thing alone.

Until next time,

Chaitanya