I often find myself frustrated with writing. I feel like the market is so competitive, nobody will ever read my works. I won't become a national phenomenon, and I'll never meet amazing authors like J.K. Rowling and Tamora Pierce. It's not that I don't enjoy writing, granted, but every once and a while, I get depressed about it. I want to see the paperback artwork for my book... instead of just pixels on my computer screen.
These times are the times when I stop writing. Why? Because I feel like I have so little freedom any way, why should I waste it doing something that isn't going to get me anywhere. It's a long jump from the girl sitting on the old stone wall, a tattered paperback in her hand, breathing in the words as though she could live in the magical world she was reading about.
I'm in that place right now. I could write, but I feel no motivation to write my fiction. So when I do write, I am spending my time writing non-fiction: my life, my memories, my thoughts. In other words, blogging. Is blogging dangerous to my writing life? Or is it just frosting to fill in the cracks until my muse returns from her vacation in the Bahamas? I can't tell. Both, I think, sometimes. For example, I am sitting here, writing this blog entry, when I very well could be writing my flash fiction of the day. That's what I should be doing; I'm supposed to do it every day. But I don't do it often. In fact, I rarely do it at all, lately. Simultaneously, I am also aware that there have been days in the past where I've written four flashes because I just didn't want to stop. I wrote twenty pages in a day when I started working on Absolutely Mad. Now that was fun. I was so incredibly proud of myself. Eric and Yvette were imprinted in my mind and they felt more alive to me than any of the Sin Series characters have in a long time.
Through writing at school (during class, occasionally), I have learned that I have the capacity to be an incredibly prolific writer. I often do as many as 500 words in a mere blog entry, and I don't have a terribly difficult time writing 2000 words a day, when properly inspired. If I remember correctly, Stephen King says he does 2000 words a day in On Writing. He considers himself a prolific writer. So I should be proud of myself.
Only, it's making myself do it. I blame my muse, often. It's so frustrating to sit in front of my computer screen and listen to it hum and have the bright white pop out until my eyes water up, but have my fingers frozen on the keys as though they were superglued there. I blame the economy, writer's block, my muse, all of it, but that's all lies. See, I have ideas in my head to write about. Sometimes, I even have paragraphs prepared. But in the end, they're all just in my head, and they never end up down on paper. I wish I could say why.
In order to attempt to redeem myself, I am going to go attempt to write a flash. What do you do when you know you should be writing, but you just can't? And does blogging count as "writing" in the sense of it being an art form, even if I am just pouring out my thoughts? And what do you think: is blogging a distraction from "real writing"?
0 secrets:
Post a Comment