We are two weeks into this Creativity Challenge and I have yet to write enough to fill up a single page in the story I'm working on. I have ideas jotted down here and there, on napkins and in notebooks, on scrap pieces of paper floating around in my purse, even on the jacket of last weekend's Southwest Airlines boarding pass. But none of it's cohesive, and none of it gets me over this mental block I'm facing right now. In fact, I'm not sure any of it actually even applies to the story I'm writing now, they're all just little scenes that play out in short paragraphs and spurts of dialogue, half-baked conversations (or the outline of conversations) that have yet to find a plot to belong to.
I feel like the only thing left to do is to lock myself in a room with my laptop and some music and not let myself out until I'm at least a chapter in. I'm too easily distracted otherwise.
Or I could just abandon this story altogether.
But that would be giving up, and I feel like I've given up too many times, discarded too many drafts and left too many stories unfinished. Aside from my desperate fear of plagiarizing something I've read and loved and internalized, this fear is my constant companion these days: the incomplete story belonging to the writer who doesn't write.
I think I'll try option #1 first.
July 15, 2010
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1 comment:
I'm struggling too, and I think what's helping me is doing exactly what you said and forcing myself to work on it. I've also stopped trying to approach it linearly, because I'm not really sure how to start, but I am working my way in by writing parts that I know.
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