Tuesday 31 January 2012

Chipping Away at the Writer's Block






Progress a little slow, as you can see, because the Steves are busy doing other jobs around the house - there's a little bit of light waterproofing going on and some more noggins going in, but at the moment the main focus of the action is somewhere else.

Progress can also seem painfully slow when you're starting out on a writing project.  It can sometimes take weeks and months for you to warm up (loosen up?) enough to hit your stride, so the opening phase of the work can seem discouraging and disproportionately difficult.

Try and think of it in these terms -- it's not about the distance you cover, it's about depth you reach.  You'll get more satisfaction and achieve better results if you are writing down and down into the heart of yourself and your subject, rather than sprinting along the easy route over the surface. That's not to say you should deprive yourself of the glorious exhilaration of the sprint, but it's helpful to realise that just as much work is being done on those slow days of drudgery when your brain is in overdrive, but you can only squeeze out a few painful and stolid sentences.  Hitting the brick wall, the difficult stuff, is where you learn how to write at your best and the start of that process is learning to write through the dead days, even if this involves losing speed. Loss of velocity doesn't equate to loss of direction, so shouldn't result in a  loss of hope...

So keep grinding it out, keep writing, remember the challenging imbalance of the perspiration/inspiration equation.  The only way to shift the block is to keep chipping away at it.

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