Monday, April 27, 2015

W is for Writing (and Wringing my hands)

Anyone who has read this blog before will know that I am a writer.  Or at least, I try to be a writer.  Being a writer requires me to write, and actually doing that part has been a struggle this year.

Partly it's been revising which is an important part of writing.  But revising isn't what I love doing.  It's a thing I have to do to make my writing work the way I want it to do.  Revising is like renovations where writing is building a house.

But right now, I wish I was revising again.  I haven't found the right way into this new story yet, so I'm writing a lot of words I know I'll end up throwing away.  But for me, that's how it starts with some projects.  I have to write a bunch of beginnings to find the way into the story.

Other stories feel like they've already been written and just fall out of my brain onto the page.  I love those ones.  They need revising too - often a lot of revising - but it doesn't take me time to get into the story I want to tell.

But I can't not write.  I've tried and the stories keep coming and bombarding my brain and then I eventually have to get myself in front of my computer and let the words come out.  Sometimes they're good words, and sometimes they're not.  The book I started last week is my 12th.  There are a lot of abandoned novels lurking in my hard-drive, some finished, some only a few thousand words in.  I have to hope that one day I'll have the energy and drive to resurrect some of those stories, because when I wrote them, I loved them enough to spend that time getting them on paper.

Then again.  There's probably a reason why I abandoned them...

Do you write?  Do you struggle with it?

2 comments:

  1. Every time I finish a book, I think: There, that's my last one. But then I start again, wondering why I would ever think that.

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  2. There are some days where every word is a struggle for me. I know the effort is what makes the work good, but man, is it tiring...

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