As I sat down on Sunday morning to begin editing 'The Wish Bone,' all sorts of negativity crept in - it's no good, you aren't as good as you were back then, it's too long since you wrote anything. Fear.
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| Path in Austrailia |
With my novel it's like endlessly climbing the same mountain. Each time you re-start you seem to be at the bottom of the pile.
Hemingway said," Writing's easy - you just sit over your typewriter and bleed."
So on Sunday I fiddled around with facebook, couldn't resist checking my emails, and kept reading over and over Caroline's words, worrying about how the plot fitted together. Then I tired meditation, something new to me, which for me just means sitting in a room on the floor and trying not to think about thinking. There is no rest from the busy mind, it keeps me awake at night, inhabits my dreams, leaves me exhausted.
So, in the end I forced myself to sit there and focus on the text and the words, and I gave myself an end time - one o'clock. As the deadline approached I suddenly entered the 'zone' and I was away. I edited 5 pages - it's slow but then it was re-writing, as it really wasn't as polished or meaningful as it should be. Stephen King in his book 'On Writing' which I can recommend says you need to get closer to the truth, and that's what I was aiming at.
In the afternoon I had a much more productive day with my family than usual. Becuase I'd only allowed myself to be creative in a time frame, I could then be free to really be with my family when I wasn't writing. And I promised myself I'd write the novel everyday. Have I? Well yesterday I was just too busy checking out instructional video's from the 30 DC project, and tonight it's my writing group, so no, not yet!
Happy writing and reading everyone.
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