Tag: writing

The Plan

The plan to salvage my book and sanity. Basic, but it’s a start.

Write.

That’s the plan; write. It seems simple. What many don’t know is that I have a hard time taking my own advice and I have taken every avenue to avoid doing just that.

I am willing to admit impatience makes up the lion’s share of the blame. Throughout this journey to become a serious writer with hopes to become a full fledge author, I have wanted that New York Time’s best seller since yesterday, ten years ago.

The entitled millennial I want it now spirit reared it’s ugly head and for a time I considered quitting. My drafts were trash and I begin to question if I had it. I have yet to define the “it”.

The goal is to write more frequently and to simply take it easy on myself, and I have decided to take 2022 head on and carve out time to develop my skill. I begin even if the idea or the thought isn’t fully developed, the ideas are there. It is putting them on the screen that shows the disconnect.

I’ve discovered that chasing the perfect first draft has always been my Achilles’ heel. I have learned that it is okay; every idea or plot isn’t meant to be a trilogy or HBO series. You have to write in order to get the sludge out of the way and hit black gold-or rather the literary jackpot. I am learning the process takes time.

Trusting the process is hard but trusting myself is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Depression

It comes out of the blue bringing with it Darkness and dread; I hoped it would stop, give me some reprieve

I’ve given enough. I’ve given everything

When it comes, it arrives like a quiet Alabama storm, I can only huddle like a small child. I am afraid of this darkness, terrified of what it can bring, the thoughts it has brought with it before.

But It never comes alone.

Depression always brings friends, its posse; Hopelessness, Unworthiness, and Dread. They stand patiently as the table is being set. Quietly, they take their seat ready for tea time as they sip on my emotions and dine on my sanity leaving only scraps.

Desperately, I fumble around stitching pieces together trying to find enough that I can use to function as I go about my day pretending that I am whole.

That I’m okay.

Old Method, Better Results

I get it now.

I am understanding what are my hangups when it comes to sitting down and turning imagined plots and characters into words on the screen. My main roadblock was trying to edit while writing.

Editing while writing doesn’t work for this writer and I found myself so focused on grammatical errors and attending to the annoying red underlined words that the thoughts got lost before I had a chance to type them.

So, I went back old school.

I went back to writing in a notebook. This pulls my attention away from editing while writing and I am not worried about getting everything perfect as it comes out of my head. While I am writing, prefection doesn’t exist for me, instead it is about developing thoughts and putting what’s in my head down in a coherent way.

Now, I will say that having to go back and decipher my hand writing and then type everything into a word doc is a tad bit annoying but this has proven to be very effective to me and my writing that I don’t intend to give it up anytime soon.

Let me know your thoughts and what has been some hangups that you as a writer have had to overcome.