Blank pages. Blank screens. They sit there, mocking me.
After rapid-fire churning out four novellas and six novels in the past year or so, I’m once again stuck in the “you’re not allowed to think” phase of writing. I try to think, to get the words to leave the recesses of my brain and venture onto the page, but that’s a hard “no” these days. Even though I have a pretty decent chapter-by-chapter outline, when it comes to getting the prose down I just can’t.
I go through these phases a lot, but even though I’ve been able to get through each of them so far, while I’m in this state it’s always hard to imagine getting out of it. It’s like I’m stuck at the bottom of a deep, black pit, and the only way to find words again is to climb out. Too bad I suck at climbing.
I think part of my problem is genre-hopping. I was hardcore in the zone with the paranormal romance reverse harem books, but then I slowed down and wrote a M/F paranormal romance with low-to-medium steam. I thought maybe that would help me switch gears to dystopian sci-fi, which is the setting/genre for my next project, but sadly that’s not the case. I have all of next month to finish this prequel novella for the Abnormalverse books, but each day that I go without writing–or with writing very little–is another several hundred words that I have to make up the next time I get to writing. Might not seem like a lot when my usual daily word count goal is one or two thousand words, but those missed words add up.
Even this blog post is taking a lot out of me, metaphorically speaking. It should be easy to write, but I’m dragging the words out of my thick skull and jamming them onto the screen in a vain attempt to feel like a writer.
The words will come–eventually. In the meantime, I’ll have to keep forcing them out until I get back in the flow of things. I can always fix crap if that’s what it turns out to be, but I can’t fix nothing. Nothing takes a lot more to repair than crap.