Friday, June 17, 2011

Moving in the Write Direction - 1

So I came up with a new term this morning. I told my sis-in-law that I'm experiencing "writer's sludge." It's not exactly writer's block - I mean, I have ideas and word strings and all the good stuff in my head, but getting it onto the page, so to speak, is like slogging through ankle-deep mud. I can almost feel the sucking pull of the struggle to get words out of my head and put them where I can see them...well, where others can see them. Like I said, they're in my head.
Sometimes it's like video. I see fiction in scenes like a movie and it doesn't all format right when I try to puke the guts of it out, but that's drafting craft and editing craft is always necessary, at least for me. Editing is where my perfectionist OCD kicks in.
Sometimes it's audio - I hear the sentence structures and how the words flow. Usually that's my poetry, but it happens in just about everything I write at one point or another.
Sometimes it's a tactile thing. I'm a writer who still needs to hold the pen and scribble words to physically force them out of my head most of the time. Blogging isn't like that, but the rest of my writing usually is.
Writers write. Procrastinating writers...uh...study writing techniques and make excuses about why they aren't finished with their projects, aren't published yet, aren't making progress...well, you get it. It's like any other procrastinating. I want to move beyond the excuses and make a success of myself in my writing the way I have in education (so far - I have dreams and goals to achieve yet in that arena as well). 
So I have a summer goal: write a lot.

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