I read recently of an author who sits down every week day from 9 until 3 and writes. (Or at the very least, he sits down to work. Perhaps there’s plotting, idea spewing, mass-deletion in there, too. I dunno.) That amazes me. Not because I cannot do that. Rather, I think it’s the consistency of it. Forcing the muse to have office hours.
I should talk, right? After all, my blog has very quickly lapsed into “sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.”
Sigh.
I guess here’s my problem. I have too many projects going at once. Where once I feared I would only ever have the One Idea that started me down the writing path, I soon grabbed a hold of any number of stories, hastily scribbling down skeletons of plot and sketches of characters, terrified to lose even one.
And now I don’t know what to do next. Days–weeks, months!–of plugging away at a project have led to capricious back-burner-ing as a new story comes along and begs to be addressed. Old projects resurface, new headway is found. Each plot slowly fills itself in.
And then there are the re-works. A story that seemed ready to go suddenly is full of moth holes and I scrap and re-write, re-plot.
Is this normal? I don’t rightly know. Is it frustrating? Sometimes.
Sometimes it helps. No better way to fight the brick wall of writer’s block than to simply switch to a project that feels ready to work.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll have 3 things done at once, instead of just the one.
Fingers crossed!
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