WRITING UPDATE

I found this writing update in my drafts — unpublished from over a year ago (14 March 2016) — but most of it is still relevant to my writing life at the moment.

I think that there comes a time in every writer’s career — or in my case, pretend career — where he or she just grinds to a halt. Suddenly the empty spaces on the page loom over you like some monster from under your childhood bed, your fingers can’t quite move fast enough to get the words right. They do the little I-don’t-know-what-to-write-but-I-need-to-write dance over the keyboard, going through the motions but never touching the keys.

I am currently in one of those ruts. The project I was so excited about just a month or two ago has now completely lost me. I feel like one of us has outrun the other — either I’ve moved on or it has powered on without me.

But, if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I am a Stubborn Mule Person, and so of course I am not going to let this one go. I told myself that I would finish a book this year, and being about 40,000 words in I am absolutely not wasting all those precious words by letting this project die.

Another reason that I might be in this rut is because my mind is still churning out new story ideas. I have an entire YA high fantasy series sitting up in my brain just aching to be spilled onto the page, and I’m so tempted to table my current project and pick up the next one.

(Spoiler alert: I did. The first book of that series is well under way and probably the favorite thing that I’m writing at the moment!)

I think that the point of this post is just that some people are well-organized, able to start a story and finish it without getting sidetracked, and some people are manuscript-jugglers, eager to see just how many worlds they can balance between their quick-moving hands.

I’m most definitely the latter.

Fellow writers out there: how’s your story going? What kind of writer are you?

 

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